Ask HN: Will GPT-3 bring a worthy competitor to Google search?

We can only hope. In the end, Google will fall when new technology is accessible and powerful enough to create search in a new way. Competing with them as they are is impossible, but competing on search from a new paradigm is possible. If not GPT-3, then something is coming. But I doubt it will look like Google search, it will be different, but will fulfill the same need

Google is fucked. GPT-3 understands queries on a whole other level. GPT-3 brings books, links, articles to life as a conversation.

> since GPT-3 has achieved the algorithmic part of the story

Has it? From what I've seen it's just an autocomplete that looks natural.

GPT can be used to build auto suggestion to search engine. scalable and intelligent crawling, indexing, serving, re-ranking parts are still needs to be developed. IMO, success of search engine business is not merely a technical advancements.

No, but it can enhance Google for certain queries.

Just some things that GPT3 can't do:

- A large portion (of at least mine) queries are 'grep the internet' type of queries. GPT3's powers lie in directly opposite part of the spectrum.

- GPT3's output can not be trusted. It is basically a statistical output of the most likely words to be responding the prompt. In many cases it will be complete gibberish and you have no way of knowing (programmatically) that it is so that you could potentially replace it with something else.

- GPT3 is notoriously bad with numbers and dates.

Finally Google has managed to redefine what search means to the point that 'to search something' means 'to google something' and even if you had superior (by what measure?) results, if they don't match what we are used to getting from Google, you might have a barrier to adoption.

So my bet is that NLP models will augment the abilities of search engines, not replace them. We see that happening already.

Google has all the data about what people clicked and if they thought that link was useful. That is a lot of data that other people don't have.

GPT3 isn’t generally able to cite sources and tends to confabulate realistic but incorrect answers to questions. It’s great as an ideation tool, much less so as a search engine.