Will ChatGPT (Internet Browse Feature) Make Google Search Obsolete?

Google versus OpenAI's ChatGPT. It's an intriguing battle of technology titans. There's a burgeoning narrative suggesting that GPT, with its rapidly evolving capabilities, is set to outshine the behemoth that is Google. This prospect has ignited conversations, debates, controversies in the tech sphere. So let's unravel the veracity of this bold assertion. Will ChatGPT supersede internet search? And the answer, I think, could astonish you. Now, it's crucial to remember that Google and ChatGPT are fundamentally distinct technologies at their core. Google is the titan of internet search. It operates on a unique algorithm analyzing vast data landscape of the web and understanding user queries. And Google seeks to deliver the most relevant search results for you, the user, to explore. It excels in this space thanks to its sophisticated and evolving algorithm, and that's the value of Google as a company. On the other hand, ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI, and it's trained on an extensive dataset which includes the internet to understand and generate human-like text based on given prompts. It's not designed to search in a traditional sense like Google, but to generate creative, coherent, contextually accurate output based on the input it receives. So Google provides you resources to explore, OpenAI provides answers to questions. Both technologies have their own strengths and unique applications, and as we proceed further, we'll delve deeper into this captivating tussle of technology prowess. So how do you access the internet using ChatGPT-4? The road to internet navigation via ChatGPT-4 is paved by OpenAI's recent advancements. And accessing this new frontier allows you to go ahead and connect the OpenAI model to the internet. So let's take a look. So open Settings, and this is going to enable you to select Web Browsing from a selection of beta features, and that's going to grant your chat access to the web. Now this is important. Once you open a chat in the sidebar, you are selecting which AI tools you will use for that chat thread. And if you select web browsing for that chat, then any activity within that chat is going to include web browsing. If you choose plugins, then the plugins that you select will remain activated for everything in that bookmark chat. If you select GPT-435, then that chat is specifically going to be using that tool. Now you have choices that did not exist a while ago You can use default ChatGPT, or you can activate web browsing to mix it with internet access. Then there's these plugins, a tantalizing option we'll explore in a minute. So let's take a look at the plugin store and see if all the hype that we have heard about plugins and GPT are really as revolutionary as the clickbait is indicating. So my assessment is that plugins offer a glimpse of the future but are not really high value at this time. As of now, they lean more towards entertainment than business, and I'm not seeing a compelling business use for plugins. Now, I'm not alone. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is a power user of ChatGPT, the web app, and now I'm sure the iPhone app. But he has confirmed that he does not yet see a business case for plugins, and he does not use them very often. So is the hype around ChatGPT's internet prowess justified? Its access to the internet. Are we seeing true value by connecting ChatGPT to the internet, or just kind of empty glitz? Let's debunk the hype. Well, you're going to see a lot of articles, a lot of headlines out there that trumpet GPT-4's newfound web capabilities as revolutionary. But you also know that Microsoft had added ChatGPT to Bing. So this is another tool that's being added directly onto OpenAI's ChatGPT. So I want to get beyond the hype and turn to Reddit for kind of an unfiltered view, right? Reddit's a great place to get an unfiltered view. And the response we see on Reddit to GPT's ability to mix internet results is, well, it's mixed at best. So amidst the love for ChatGPT are complaints of slow performance, failed clicks, and a variety of other concerns. And really just failures of the tool to even work. One comment I found really interesting, which I think is spot on, which is, are we asking too much of ChatGPT by asking it to also perform a function that Google performs? Given that, that AI and Google Search are completely different technologies, what is even the point of trying to mix them together? So remember in February, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT, you know, OpenAI's chatbot into Bing. And a lot of rivals moved to quickly roll out their own AI chatbots connected to the internet as this kind of hype built around the buzzy technology of AI and its competition with internet search. So OpenAI has now kind of fallen into that trap and tried to integrate its tool into web. And my assessment is that search and AI are 2 different technologies. There's no need to blend them into a single product at this point. They do distinctly different things. And let's, let's dig a little deeper into that distinction. So summarizing a web page is something that Google can't do. It could feed you a web page. Can ChatGPT summarize a web page? So our first experiment involves just summarizing the Reddit page we just looked at. I ask it to categorize the comments into positive and negative, and then give me a list of some of those comments. And as ChatGPT navigates this web page in real time, Understand that it has no memory built into it, so it's not able to store that page and do some sort of algorithmic function on, on that page and then other pages linking out from it. But even on this simple task of summarization, GPT falters and it delivers a skewed summary of highlighted issues that that note, you know, speed and functionality, that it's slow, doesn't always provide the correct results. So my assessment is that slow and steady does not win the race when it comes to internet search. Google's fast, it gets you resources, you can explore those resources. ChatGPT does not compare to Google. And if we go ahead and do another thing, let's, let's go ahead and ask ChatGPT to summarize a Medium article on what is ChatGPT. And the result, after a very tedious process that took close to 3 minutes, was that it was unable to do so. And you can see all the process that it's trying to go through in order to summarize this simple web page. It's not even that long. And so the time that it would take to do multiple articles It's just not going to work. Okay, you could have sourced and read those articles on Google faster than it takes ChatGPT to serve up a non-response. In conclusion, Google remains the reigning champion of internet search. While ChatGPT is making some strides in AI technology that are remarkable, it's not ready to topple Google and Google's function of internet search. Stay tuned for more insights so we can help you elevate your GPT experience, your GPT game. I'm Enrico Schaefer. Remember to share, subscribe, and power up on AI.