But it does know a lot of things and can be super useful. Personally i think search engine is a terrible use case, unless you use the Bing enabled version, or bing chat.
I've used it to write pretty complicated scripts where I had no idea what I was doing, rebuild crusty httpd configs from first principles, explain disassembled code, explain regular code, explain configs, read dmidecode and lspci for me and make a pcie slot report... It's bloody brilliant.
Other: read and translated my blood tests. Accurately!
It both picked out the interesting places of note, and then I asked it to plan them in such a way that made sense walking-wise (so I wasn't backtracking) and it did so without a hiccup.
What Bing does is to use your query to search the web and use the top N search results in the context window for the chat.
However I’ll push back on your pushback. ChatGPT doesn’t need to be perfect to be a killer app. It is highly flawed. Maybe it was a bit to strident to say ChatGPT will kill Google search, but it’s strictly better for a lot of squishy queries that don’t have a factual basis.
How can I convince my boss to give me a raise? gets you a listicle on Google and a highly specific response on ChatGPT. And if some of the advice doesn’t apply, you can continue directing the conversation. It’s an idea generator, even if some of them are bad or don’t make sense.
Given the “weights in a matrix” architecture of ChatGPT, I’m not sure it’s possible to store enough data to make the query practical to answer. Say there are a couple hundred intersections in my city. You have to store the token of “restaurant name” “close to” “intersection” for each intersection. I don’t know the size of Google’s Maps DB, but I would guess it’s several Gigabytes per city. From my understanding of the theory, you would need to store BOTH the LLM weights AND the Maps data for ChatGPT to have a shot at generating good answers for that type of query.
I’m happy to be wrong here. If I’m misunderstanding something, please let me know.