Will ChatGPT kill search engines or transform them?

ChatGPT, where GTP stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. It says that its mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Investors in OpenAI include Microsoft, Reid Hoffman’s charitable foundation and Khosla Ventures.

Given the importance of this development, “Will ChatGPT kill search engines or transform them?” is a hot GD Topic 2023. It can be part of MBA Essay Writing, WAT, Extempore and Personal Interviews for MBA admissions for IIMs and other competitive exams. So MBAUniverse.com recommends MBA aspirants to read this topic carefully. 

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ChatGPT was launched as a prototype on November 30, 2022, and quickly got a lot of attention for its detailed responses and coherent answers across many domains of knowledge. However, its uneven factual accuracy was identified as a significant drawback.

What is ChatGTP?
ChatGPT is a large language model chatbot developed by OpenAI based on GPT-3.5. It has a remarkable ability to interact in conversational dialogue form and provide responses that can appear surprisingly human. According to Stanford University “GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters and was trained on 570 gigabytes of text. For comparison, its predecessor, GPT-2, was over 100 times smaller at 1.5 billion parameters. This increase in scale drastically changes the behavior of the model — GPT-3 is able to perform tasks it was not explicitly trained on, like translating sentences from English to French, with few to no training examples. This behaviour was mostly absent in GPT-2. Furthermore, for some tasks, GPT-3 outperforms models that were explicitly trained to solve those tasks, although in other tasks it falls short.”

GPT-3.5 was “trained” on massive amounts of data about code and information from the internet, including sources like Reddit discussions, to help ChatGPT learn dialogue and attain a human style of responding. ChatGPT was also trained using human feedback (a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback) so that the AI learned what humans expected when they asked a question. Training the LLM this way is revolutionary because it goes beyond simply training the LLM to predict the next word.

How is CHATGTP different from Search Engine?
ChatGPT is interactive while search engines passively provide article links. This has made many experts believe that search engines will become redundant. However due to current limitations of CHATGTP, and dominance of Google in Search, both are expected to coexist.  

Microsoft to launch a version of Bing that uses ChatGPT
Microsoft is reportedly planning to launch a version of Bing that uses ChatGPT to answer search queries. The Information reports that Microsoft hopes to launch the new feature before the end of March in a bid to make Bing more competitive with Google.

By using the technology behind ChatGPT, Bing could provide more humanlike answers to questions instead of just links to information. Both Google and Bing already surface relevant information from links at the top of many search queries, but Google’s knowledge panels are particularly widespread when it comes to searching for information about people, places, organizations, and things.

Microsoft’s use of ChatGPT-like functionality could help Bing rival Google’s Knowledge Graph, a knowledge base that Google uses to serve up instant answers that are regularly updated from crawling the web and user feedback.

Microsoft has been betting its future on AI for at least six years, with CEO Satya Nadella discussing the importance of more intelligent apps and services. It looks like together with ChatGPT, Microsoft now wants to try and make that a reality inside Bing. However due to current limitations of CHATGTP, and dominance of Google in Search, both are expected to coexist.

ChatGPT faces many challenges and Limitations
While ChatGPT has impressed the web with its ability to generate answers and authentic-looking essays across an array of topics. But, the system still has major flaws — including racial biases and a tendency to present incorrect information as true fact. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has cautioned that “it’s a mistake to be relying on [ChatGPT] for anything important right now.” Google has already said it won’t immediately launch its own rival because of “reputational risk.” Google reportedly cited bias and factuality issues with existing AI chatbots as a reason it’s not ready to replace search just yet.

OpenAI itself mentions following limitations

• ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.
• ChatGPT is sensitive to tweaks to the input phrasing or attempting the same prompt multiple times.
• The model is often excessively verbose and overuses certain phrases, such as restating that it’s a language model trained by OpenAI.
• Ideally, the model would ask clarifying questions when the user provided an ambiguous query. Instead, our current models usually guess what the user intended.
• While we’ve made efforts to make the model refuse inappropriate requests, it will sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biased behavior.