Dear AI hype train, stop confusing novel for useful
ChatGPT is coming for Google Search, or is it?
At the moment it’s hard to read anything on the Internet without coming across some article or another proclaiming that search is about to be changed forever. The culprit is ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) that has thrown up some incredible results in a very short space of time. Microsoft promptly invested $10 billion into it and is rolling it out with Bing and their Office Suite. 100 million people had tried the free version in the first month. Google declared a code red. Microsoft’s share price has rocketed. Google’s tanked after their AI chatbot got an answer wrong. We live in exciting times.
ChatGPT promises to allow people to have a conversation with a computer. It can write poems, it can pass the Google coding interview, if can summarise documents, a judge has used it in formulating a legal argument, it is multilingual, teachers are terrified their pupils will do their homework with it, you can ask it questions and have a conversation about the answers. The list goes on and on.
Now, don’t get me wrong, these are incredible outcomes and represent a seismic shift in the state of the art. But, all the hype stops the important question — is it useful as a replacement for search? Because, ultimately this is what Microsoft wants to break into.
