Thread by @mmitchell_ai

In order to understand why ChatGPT can't replace Google Search, it's useful to understand the early days of web search and the role that PageRank played. 1/n

Before PageRank, a search would return a slew of websites of mixed utility, quality, and veracity. The results were directly tied to matches between what you queried and the text on the pages. 2/n

A web search query (roughly) meant putting in a sequence of text as a query, and getting back websites with the most likely sequences of text following your query. 3/n

That's similar to where we are with ChatGPT today.
Except, the websites are erased, and instead you get snippets of likely response text extracted from different websites. 4/n

But there was a fundamental breakthrough in Search tech with the implementation of PageRank.
With PageRank, the fact that websites link to one another could be used to identify which websites were *the most* linked to.
The *most linked* sites are the ones people tend to want. 5/n

This breakthrough was built on the *traceability* of information from the web: the linking between sources and their content. 6/n

But with ChatGPT, this traceability is erased.
The connections-between-sites that has been the bedrock of uncovering (somewhat) reliable information on the web is removed. 7/n

Crudely, what this means is that ChatGPT is in a stage that's similar to the early days of web search: Yes it can give a lot of information, no there is not a great match between what you want and useful or reliable results. 8/n

We will likely get to a place where there is a ChatSearch app that provides reasonable information. But it will require a fundamental change in how we train models like ChatGPT: 9/n

It will require training on the network of linked web sources & leveraging how they point to one another.
10/10