According to The Information, Microsoft is reportedly planning to pair a version of its Bing search engine with the ChatGPT AI platform to provide search query responses rather than just listing relevant links.

If this transfer is real, will search engines become obsolete or undergo a significant redesign?

Will ChatGPT supplant search engines?

If you ask Google Search, it will return thousands of results. The reason for this craze is that ChatGPT is interactive while search engines passively present article hyperlinks. ChatGPT can write poems, articles, tweets, books, and even code like people. Many have come to believe that search engines will become obsolete as a result of this. Even ChatGPT was referred to as a “Code Red” for Google’s search operation by The New York Times. Rebooting.AI creator Gary Marcus jokingly tweeted: “Sure however you may make it (ChatGPT) work! Simply hook it as much as a search engine, that’s all!

But how they operate is different. How?

A large language model (LLM) called Generative Pre-trained Transformer serves as the foundation for ChatGPT (GPT-3.5). It has even impressed people like Chris Andersen, the curator of TED, and Elon Musk. Trained to predict the following word on a sizable dataset of text and present it in a user-friendly manner. On the other hand, fully automated search engines like Bing or Google Search use software called web crawlers to regularly search the internet for pages that can be indexed in real time and then serve the information pertinent to a user query.

What constraints exist for search engines?

Search engines only offer links to articles, and even these can be changed by algorithms that determine page rankings. They are unable to interact with users or respond to inquiries in a user-friendly dialogue format, in contrast to ChatGPT. If search engines’ algorithms determine that it fits your profile as set forth in your settings, they may also show irrelevant links or unwarranted advertisements.

What are the restrictions of ChatGPT?

Since ChatGPT has only been trained on data through the end of 2021, it is still undergoing testing and lacks knowledge of current events. Additionally, it is not web-connected. It repeats sentences by rewording them and overuses some phrases. According to OpenAI, which developed the chatbot, it sometimes writes “plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.” Additionally, ChatGPT lacks a fact-checking system and does not identify the source of the information. Unlike search engines, it depends on how the query is phrased.

ChatGPT promises to “reinvent” search.

However, ChatGPT isn’t a search engine slayer. To produce better results, it will need to be updated on current information and connected to the internet, but this will increase its costs (which are projected to be $3 million per month). The DALL-E 2 AI picture technology is already available on Bing, so Microsoft may need to do the same with ChatGPT. BlenderBot3 from Meta is already connected to the internet. Additionally, the WebGPT prototype developed by OpenAI uses a text-based browser to submit search requests, view hyperlinks, scroll web pages, and cite sources. The change has already occurred.