It looks like it has web browsing support built-in in some form, but it's disabled at the moment. That said, I'm skeptical that it'd be able to "disrupt" google, as the track record of things that are said to do that is quite bad. On the other hand, google seems to be heading in the same direction with projects such as Lamda. In a roundabout way, this might just end up being the quick answer box at the top of search results in the future?

Yes it seems like an exact match for Google's top box. But as mentioned, they need to work on explaining themselves. That is what the current top box still does better.

I don’t think it actually can browse the web. It’s obviously been trained with an extensive web-sourced corpus.

It seems that the developers have placed guardrails around web-search-like queries not because ChatGPT can’t answer them, but because they want to discourage using it that way for—I’d guess because they want to direct usage towards the conversational / contextual aspects they’re trying to improve.

The presumable pre-prompt, extracted through clever prompts, seems to indicate a browsing setting, which is disabled.

There's also WebGPT[0] already with such capabilities, which could've been merged to ChatGPT.

[0] https://openai.com/blog/webgpt/

Keep in mind that "setting" is part of a prompt for a language model, also asking it to behave like an assistant: They're nudging it so it doesn't pretend that it can actually browse, but such setting might not actually exist.

I’d love to have an AI that I can ask “give me a list of all currently available products satisfying all of the following conditions […]” (because Amazon and Google are largely useless when you’re looking for specific properties or have specific constraints). That is, it’s the query capabilities I’d be excited about.

...and if they give URLs for sources that contributed to the answer (assuming those can be maintained in any meaningful way) it becomes a lot more difficult to handwave away the copyright minefield all of these AI prompt systems are attempting to tiptoe through.

the problem is ads. there will always be people who will try to promote their results, and it will somehow arrive to ChatGPT. there will be chatGPT SEO, people will try to promote their answers so that ChatGPT will chose these answers. Think of "what's the best pizza in NY" - SEO would pollute the web with hundreds of different articles which places Pizza Foo as #1, and those articles probably be scanned by OpenGPT. The good part here is that you might be able to optimize your query like "what's the best pizza in NY, based on /r/pizza subreddit? exclude bots (based on their karma reputation)"