Can ChatGPT replace Google?

Could ChatGPT compete against Google search

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ChatGPT has become a viral phenomenon. The AI model has been making headlines ever since its launch last year. Its ability to respond to a wide range of questions and simulate human speech has impressed the world. The next question on many people’s minds is: Can ChatGPT replace Google?

As it currently stands, ChatGPT cannot replace Google. Search engines, like Google, are built to index words and phrases, crawling billions of pages on the internet to find what you are looking for. Their primary use is to search for websites and recommend other potentially related pages.

However, AI models, like ChatGPT do something very different. ChatGPT is a natural language processing model. It was trained using a massive amount of data and was fine-tuned to operate like a chatbot.

To use the model, you simply type in a request and ChatGPT will output a text response. The AI is very limited to the information it was trained on and does not have access to the internet. This is why ChatGPT has very limited knowledge of events that happened after 2021.

For this exact reason, models like ChatGPT would not work well as search engines. Imagine trying to ask the model what time your local supermarket closes, it simply can’t.

If AI models could access the internet in real-time, would they work as search engines? Well, a major issue with this idea is that ChatGPT builds human-like responses by predicting and formulating a string of words, based on its knowledge of human dialogue.

It isn’t just regurgitating information that already exists. For example, if you asked ChatGPT the same question repeatedly, it would give different responses each time. Therefore, the model could never be a reliable search engine.

Is ChatGPT a search engine?

In short, no. It is not a search engine. ChatGPT is an online AI language model by the tech company, OpenAI. When you ask the model a question or a request, it does not pull up results from the internet. Instead, it uses its own data and natural language processing techniques to generate a response.

Can Google compete with ChatGPT?

Well, Google has been working in the artificial intelligence field for some time now. They have their own large language model PaLM and an AI chatbot, Bard, which is a direct competitor to ChatGPT.

Is ChatGPT replacing Google?

ChatGPT is not replacing Google. OpenAI’s chatbot is not designed to act as a search engine. It functions well as a question-answering chatbot and a personal assistant for a variety of tasks. So, if you were hoping to use ChatGPT to find your local bus schedule you may want to think again.

Final Thoughts

As it currently stands, ChatGPT could not possibly replace Google search. Despite some overlaps, search engines and AI language models have completely different objectives.

In other news, you can add a ChatGPT chrome extension to your browser now. To learn how to do so, read our article here.

Funmi joined PC Guide in November 2022 and has a knowledge of AI apps, gaming and consumer technology.