For the last 2 months, everyone (well, investors and the media) has been speculating how ChatGPT could disrupt Google’s iron-clad grip on web search and the advertising revenue it feeds on. ChatGPT doesn’t produce urls. Rather it does what we wish Google and Bing would do for us; just answer the question. Oh, and give us some links in case we want to know more, and in case you want to earn some advertising dollars.
Well, take a look below. Better yet, go to Bing and try it out. I find the responses useful, easy to read, and accurate so far. But, ….
Note how simple and clean this is! The Author and Bing
Couple of things I noticed here. First, Bing added a relatively out-of-place reference to “current forecasts predict a moderate improvement in performance” from ChatGPT. I didn’t ask about performance, and I can only surmise that the reference is to the upcoming Hopper GPU which has a Transformer Engine expected to increase performance for all transformer models using mixed precision math. Second, note the three ChatGPT results which answered my question and two more related questions, are all accompanied by a link I can click on to find out more, providing Bing with a shot to earn some money.
But wait, look again. It isn’t quite right, is it? The second alternative question is backwards! It should ask “Will ChatGPT increase the demand for NVIDIA GPUs?”, not the other way around! And the answer is really for the intended question we pose here. While a bug, it still gave the answer to the intended question. So, Microsoft still got a few things to work out, imho. But it is a nice first try.
Want to know more? Scroll down to find a traditional Bing search result:
The search quickly shows the traditional links which can generate ad revenue. The author and Microsoft Bing
Conclusions
For a rush job, this looks pretty good; at least Bing is offering what we all asked for: give me an interface to ChatGPT I don’t have to wait in line to use, but don’t walk away from the useful links we need to learn more.
We are anxiously waiting to see what Google Bard does when it releases in a couple weeks. But for now, Microsoft has taken off the gloves and is swinging for the fences. (Sorry, a mixed metaphor worthy of ChatGPT).