Other than that it betrayed no understanding of the material. It rather resembled a high school kid who had read a few too many books and spouted platitudes about any and all subjects without being aware of what was really going on.
And in either case, you're not solving the problem that commenters here are trying to solve: Google's bad results will still affect your search, so ChatGPT will be fed largely by dubious blogspam.
No, there’s a fundamental issue in that statistical language models don’t start with facts to form sentences, they form sentences based on previous tokens and statistical weights. The weights are not auditable or easily updatable.
The lucky thing for Google if they got it working, is they are half there already. As much as I despise Google, I have to admit GPT won’t be their death.
[0] https://support.google.com/knowledgepanel/answer/9787176?hl=...
That's only because it was trained on non-facts also.
But that holds for Google Search just as well ...
Google Search gives you links to content that might have the answer (excluding their own box). You can see the differences between the authors of said content.
ChatGPT gives you content that looks like the answer. You can't see the authors of the generated content.
For example, I asked who the first president of Argentina was. It gave the wrong name (Juan Manuel de Rosas) with a half-true bio. I then asked it for books where I can learn more about this person.
It produced five books. None of the book-author pairings were correct, though three of the books were real and four of the authors actually wrote books. Of the four authors that existed, three actually did write about Argentina's history, while one is a professor of Spanish and gender studies.
This is my point: ChatGPT was trained to produce text, not to produce facts. What I'm seeing here isn't just something that can be optimized away, it's fundamental to the model's design. It was basically told to produce text that looks like it could have been written on the internet. Its text is really convincing: when I saw the list of books I thought for a minute it had actually done it! But it's still just inventing text that reads well, because that's what its training was optimizing for.
It could be paired with a different system that searches for facts, but then it's just a friendly abstraction layer on top of Google or some other system, not a revolution in search.