Will ChatGPT replace search engines as the gateway to the internet?

In short, not yet.

The talented chat bot demonstrates a completely new way of accessing information from the internet. It, however, presents information with too much confidence, even when it is wrong. This applies to factual statements and code pieces:

ChatGPT output above is fallacious because it is not necessary to know the total number of items in order to determine their parity. This is where things get interesting:

Unlike a search query, which needs to be corrected directly, if search results are not acceptable, ChatGPT keeps the history of the conversation and a follow-on question or prompt can be made to get a more specific answer. This way, obtaining information feels more human and natural.

Search engine killer

In fact, it was too easy to start looking for information via ChatGPT. It is much more convenient to make a request, asking to resolve a programming error, rather than consult StackOverflow.

I originally wanted to start this post with a definition of ChatGPT. My first instinct was to paraphrase a definition from Wikipedia or the OpenAI website. Instead, I prompted ChatGPT to define itself.

"ChatGPT is a variant of the GPT-3 language model that has been fine-tuned for the task of generating human-like text in a conversational setting. It is designed to be able to carry out natural, coherent conversations with users and respond to a wide range of prompts. ChatGPT can be used to build chatbot for customer service, information gathering, and other applications that involve conversational interactions with users." - ChatGPT

A conversational companion

The world is a lonely place. A well-designed AI chat bot can potentially become a solution to many people's isolation from others. Such bot would need to create a sense of a relationship building between it and the user. The bot, perhaps, would need to simulate character. At this stage, ChatGPT is designed to shy away from making this kind of commitment, and for a good reason. Creators of ChatGPT are trying to reduce the amount of possible harm their bot can create by it's output.

Multi-language support

Out of curiosity, I have input a prompt in Russian, to see how ChatGPT would react. To my surprise, it actually worked:

ChatGPT produced a passage of accurate information about the Ulugh Beg Madrasa using coherent Russian language.

Cost

At the time of writing, ChatGPT is offered for free, research purposes. It appears that the creators of ChatGPT are using this as an opportunity to gather data about how users are interacting with their chat bot. It is unlikely that this offering will continue for too long as the running costs are currently not covered by any sort of monetization or advertisement.