Comment Re:This is great! (Score 3, Informative) 43
I think it's fair to say that both Google and ChatGPT are roughly equal when it comes to the accuracy of their responses, but the difference is that Google shows its work. It's fairly easy to look at Google's answer and see whether it came from a reputable source or a letter salad domain. ChatGPT has no such mechanism to confirm the accuracy of what's it's telling you but both its correct and incorrect answers are presented with the same level of confidence.
I would also suggest that ChatGPT won't be able to compete fully with Google until it can handle requests for commercial information. Currently ChatGPT demurs if you ask it which appliance to buy, wheres Google turns up all kinds of results. If ChatGPT does wade into these waters, it will be both under heavy scrutiny from promotive companies while various interests try to figure out how to affect ChatGPT's results.
ChatGPT has so far been an impressive technology demo but I question whether they will be able to really make it into a substantially useful product. I think it will be far more complicated and far more expensive than is generally expected.
Or, as ChatGPT says when I asked:
Overall, making ChatGPT a resource for researching consumer information would require a significant investment in data collection, preprocessing, and model training, as well as ongoing maintenance and improvement to ensure that the model remains up-to-date and relevant.