The Race to Develop a ChatGPT-enabled Search Engine Intensifies

When he first used ChatGPT, the incredibly coherent and presumably knowledgeable chatbot from OpenAI that has become an online sensation, a machine learning expert who had previously worked at Google was mesmerized. But when Chen attempted to use the same underlying artificial intelligence technology to develop a better search tool for the firm he cofounded, Moveworks, the technology's aura of strength washed away. The business use AI to assist staff members in sorting through material like technical support docs and HR pages. Including serving up addresses and phone numbers, Chen's new AI search tool was excellent at extracting all kinds of helpful information from such documents—but some of them weren't real. Its capacity for fabrication, according to Chen, is astounding. It is understandable why there is such a maniacal buzz surrounding ChatGPT and why it has been suggested that it might revolutionize search engines. By combining information from the billions of words scraped from the web and other sources to train its algorithms, the chatbot can deliver intelligent and complicated replies to inquiries. Playing around with the bot might offer the impression of experiencing a more fluid form of machine interaction. However, the way the technology operates is fundamentally at odds with the notion of a search engine that can consistently extract data from the internet. There is already a lot of incorrect information on the internet, but ChatGPT is quick to provide more. Its core algorithms produce strings of words intended to statistically match those encountered in its training data, disregarding veracity, rather than directly drawing from a database of facts or links. The web search goliaths and a few startups are forging ahead despite this obstacle and possibly encouraged by the excitement around ChatGPT. Microsoft is rumored to be integrating the underlying technology into Bing, its second-placed search engine, after making a $10 billion investment in OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT. Google is reportedly rushing to respond since it has been working on a similar chatbot dubbed LaMDA for some time. It intends to make a version of LaMDA available soon and could demonstrate up to 20 products this year that make use of the same technology. The top search engine in China, Baidu, is developing a ChatGPT-like Chinese language bot.