Chat GPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, was founded by OpenAI and introduced to public usage on 30th of November 2022. Chat after asking him a question, what is he, described “himself” as “I am trained on a massive amount of text data and can generate human-like text on a wide range of topics.” It can be used for many various purposes and can provide easy-to-understand definitions and solutions for given questions. The chatbot works in a similar, but not identical way compared to Google Search, which is, according to the first website definition provided by it, “a fully-automated search engine that uses software known as web crawlers that explore the web regularly to find pages to add to our index.” In the text below, the main differences and advantages, and limitations of both platforms are presented.
Chat GPT takes the form of some kind of a dialogue between the user and the chatbot, which is intended to be similar to human–human interaction, and the user receives an answer in one text. Where Google search takes the original way of providing information and compares great number of websites and displays the most suitable and accurate answers, but the user can look through all provided websites to find the best answer for his search.
The main advantage of Chat GPT over Google Search is, as written above, humanlike response, where the user is able to ask a very precise or broad question and the chatbot will answer them with a chosen form of text and making it easy to understand for regular people. Thus, it makes it even available for kids to some extent. Another advantage is that Chat GPT can perform some human work such as writing art, creating a plan, summarizing a text, writing a code etc. Whereas Google Search does not offer such services. Some may say that Google can provide websites to perform such actions, but will take additional time and labour from humans, whereas Chat GPT can perform all those actions on one website.
The limitation of the OpenAI product is that it does not have access to current data and as a result of that is not able to provide fully up-to-date answers. In comparison to Google, which can present current data such as news that even can be published 1 minute before searching, Chat GPT cannot be used for news or latest events research purposes.
Some say that the chatbot is a real danger to the education and creativity of users, which can result in a lack of imagination or creative thinking. It can be extremely dangerous for students, especially younger ones, which should be supervised by a parent, teacher, or another adult, to prevent a lack of creativity.
To sum up, Chat GPT and Google Search are designed to serve the same goal, to provide the user with information from a large database, internet. Personally, I find Chat GPT more innovative and easier to understand of the issue or answer. However, Google is still my number 1 choice when it comes to fast research or looking for specific information. I do not think that Chat GPT will replace traditional Google Search in near future, but when OpenAI will improve its product and add some significant changes it could be a real competitor for Google.
References
https://www.businessinsider.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-chat-gpt-2023-1?IR=T
https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-vs-google/n
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/how-search-works
In my opinion google can also get ideas from OpenAI about how it can better the google search and make it more like ChatGPT or similar. On the other hand ChatGPT doesn’t have a big enough database to replace google search as the database it is operating on is limited.
Google is already trying to stop ChatGPT, but i think it’s time to finally end the monopoly of google in the internet industry. They are scared because their main revenue is from google Ads, and thanks to ChatGPT we don’t have to search from various sites for pieces of information, and that will led to a reduction in the viewership of advertising.
In my opinion, it would be very interesting if google released a competing bot for gpt chat. This would probably trigger a race between the two companies to be the best. It would certainly be good for the development of this technology.
The problem is that chatgpt needs A LOT more energy to provide you with the same information so if there won’t be any breakthrough in energy efficiency with neural networs the answers is propably no as the google’s product will be more economicaly viable. And lets say that there is some breakthrough coming , in that case google will surely also benefit from this situation making it even more economicaly supperior.
There are various issues in using ChatGPT as a search engine. As many know the chatbot may sometimes generate fake or false information. It’s also impossible to know the source of the information that ChatGPT used in order to answer a prompt. There’s already news of google boosting their development in AI in the aftermath of OpenAI newest release. We might soon see Google release a chatbot of their own, or a chatbot addition to their regular search engine. It will be interesting to see what will Google do to stop it’s bot from spreading false information. As a way larger corporation Google could face a lot of backlash if that was the case.