Another problem with a system like ChatGPT is that its responses are based solely on the data it has been trained on. Retraining the entire model can cost millions of dollars because of its data size and scale. YouChat is confused when asked about the latest sports scores but knows what the weather is like in New York right now. Socher does not want to disclose how the updates are combined, seeing it as a competitive advantage.
“I think a lot of these chat interfaces right now are far superior to the search experience in some respects, but in other respects they are clearly still much worse,” Socher said. “We are working to reduce all of these problems.”
Aravind Srinivas, founder and CEO of search startup Perplexity AI, who previously worked at OpenAI, says the challenge of updating the system is like ChatGPT with recent information means that needs to be combined with something else. “They alone can never be a good search engine,” he said.
Saam Motamedi, a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners who has invested in artificial intelligence-based search firm Neeva, said it remains unclear whether the chat interface is compatible with the tool’s primary revenue model. Search is advertising like. Google and Bing use search queries to select ads that appear on top of the list of links provided in response. Motamedi suspects that new forms of advertising may need to emerge for chat-style search interfaces to become possible, but it’s not entirely clear what those will be. Neeva charges a subscription fee for unlimited ad-free searches.
The cost of running a model like ChatGPT on Google’s scale can also cause problems. Luis Ceze, Co-Founder and CEO of OctoMLa company that helps companies reduce the cost of implementing machine learning algorithms; estimates that running a ChatGPT search can be 10 times more expensive than a Google search, since each answer requires running an AI model large and complex.
The scale of the ChatGPT craze has surprised some AI programmers and researchers familiar with the underlying technology. The bot’s core algorithm, called GPT, is first developed by OpenAI in 2018and a more powerful version, GPT-2, is revealed in 2019. It is a machine learning Models are designed to take text and then predict what happens next, which OpenAI has shown can perform impressively if trained with huge volumes of text. The first commercial version of the technology, GPT-3, was already available for developers to use as of June 2020 and can accomplish many of the things that ChatGPT has done recently.
ChatGPT uses an improved version of the underlying algorithm, but the biggest leap in its capabilities comes from having a human in OpenAI providing feedback to the system on what produces a satisfying answer. But like previous text generation systems, ChatGPT still tends to copy the biases from its training data as “hallucination” results are reasonable but not accurate.
Gary Marcus, professor emeritus at New York University and a vocal critic of AI hype, believes that ChatGPT is not suitable for search because it has no real understanding of what it says. He added that tools like ChatGPT can cause other problems for search companies by flooding the internet with AI-generated, search engine optimized text. “All the search engines are going to crash,” he said.
Alex Ratnerassistant professor at the University of Washington and co-founder of Snorkel AI, which works in training AI models more effectively, calls ChatGPT “a legitimate change” of what software can do. But he also said it could take some time to figure out how to prevent language models like GPT from being fabricated. He believes that finding ways to keep them informed to keep search fresh will most likely involve new methods for training basic AI models.
How long those fixes would take to invent and prove to be unclear. It may take some time before technology can completely change the way people search for answers, even as other use cases come into play, such as dream about new recipes or serve as a learn or you program. “It was amazing and I told my team that people will see years before and after ChatGPT,” said Chen of Moveworks. “But whether it will replace the sought-after is another question.”
