If you think SearchGPT is ready to replace Google, you’re hallucinating too
When OpenAI debuted SearchGPT, the demonstrations suggested everything about how people look for things online would immediately change forever. But, “wow” became “wow, that’s “embarrassing” when examples of the AI search engine at work proved somewhat flawed. The challenge to Google’s reign as search engine king is still undergoing revisions.
According to a new piece in The Washington Post, SearchGPT is still wobbly on the facts. Google may not have to worry about losing its digital search throne any time soon, even as it moves at breakneck speed to implement its own AI search tools.
The issues are not hard to understand. SearchGPT is supposed to meld OpenAI’s AI models with real-time web data for faster, more accurate answers. Questions and keywords return a summary of the requested information instead of the standard Google links. It can be fast and informative. Unfortunately for OpenAI, that initial error of fact is starting to look more like the rule than the exception. As the Post pointed out, early testers saw SearchGPT claim that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was speaking at a tech conference in the near future that he wasn’t actually scheduled to attend. That’s a hallucination just as bad as anything made up by ChatGPT.
And even if SearchGPT were guaranteed to only state the truth, that’s not much of a salve when it has no way to answer your questions. Tests shared with the Post especially disparaged SearchGPT’s abilities to help out with local information. That information has to come from somewhere. Google’s decades of refined data on vast numbers of businesses and the products and services they provide make it a snap to find most of the information people might want about the places around them. And if there is anything it doesn’t already have in its databanks, its partners and subsidiaries can likely fill it in for them. SearchGPT and OpenAI have no such database access and so the responses are either nonsense or nothing.