Imagine a search engine that summarises the world’s knowledge in comprehensible terms. That doesn’t just return a ranked list of websites, but answers that are synthesised from a multitude of sources. Google has technically made human knowledge discoverable. But it has never helped mere mortals all that much to navigate the maze that is academic publishing, reputable journalism, SEO SPAM and outright manipulation. By contrast, imagine how ChatGPT in Bing can not only improve productivity, but for the first time give everyone access to the world’s knowledge. What I love about ChatGPT is that you can ask it to dumb down the answer it has previously given. And to summarise complex topics.
For the first time since Google killed the likes of Altavista, their moat has become leaky. About time! We need true competition in search and hopefully Microsoft and others will also innovate on the business model. Heaven knows I would pay for a search engine that doesn’t spy on me and gives me better results. Not to mention that this will also kill the perverse incentive for websites to do SEO. Hopefully, the web will become readable again, as a result.
> But it has never helped mere mortals all that much to navigate the maze that is academic publishing, reputable journalism, SEO SPAM and outright manipulation.
You’re far more confident than I am that a language model is going to solve this. I’m concerned that all it will do is provide an air of authenticity to these wrong answers.
The danger I see is that people will give a lot of confidence to some rare, yet terrible answers and they'll never learn to double check the info because "eh, it's not going to be wrong this time, it was right the last 254 times I asked it something". On the other hand, I suppose there is no solution to people simply refusing to be truth seekers. Many people never used the internet as it exists today to deeply research information and they won't use ChatGPT for it either.
Imagine a search engine that summarises the world’s knowledge in comprehensible terms. That doesn’t just return a ranked list of websites, but answers that are synthesised from a multitude of sources. Google has technically made human knowledge discoverable. But it has never helped mere mortals all that much to navigate the maze that is academic publishing, reputable journalism, SEO SPAM and outright manipulation. By contrast, imagine how ChatGPT in Bing can not only improve productivity, but for the first time give everyone access to the world’s knowledge. What I love about ChatGPT is that you can ask it to dumb down the answer it has previously given. And to summarise complex topics.
For the first time since Google killed the likes of Altavista, their moat has become leaky. About time! We need true competition in search and hopefully Microsoft and others will also innovate on the business model. Heaven knows I would pay for a search engine that doesn’t spy on me and gives me better results. Not to mention that this will also kill the perverse incentive for websites to do SEO. Hopefully, the web will become readable again, as a result.