[lovelearning]

It's a pretty good search engine already. I asked it the following questions on a complex social science topic from a certain country that would have taken me hours of researching and reading:

1) Explain what they are. [Explained them well.]

2) Give me examples of them in language1's literature. [It listed two books that I then verified as accurate.]

3) Are there phrases or idioms for it in other languages? [It gave equivalent idioms in Russian and two other languages]

4) Any examples for it in English literature. [It gave Hamlet and an author book I hadn't heard of. Verified that the book is accurate.)

5) Any terms for it in the academic fields of psychology and social psychology [It explained two concepts from both fields that seemed to match. I confirmed them as correct from other sources.]

It demonstrated abstraction, generalization, and hypernymy.

And actually expanded my knowledge on multiple axes - across languages, across literature, and across fields.

If a person had written an essay by compiling those answers, I wouldn't be able to identify that it's AI and not human knowledge that had written it.

[aardvark179]

Were you able to, and did you, verify its answer? In my experience it gives wrong but plausible sounding replies as often as it gives correct answers, so you have to factor in verification time when comparing the amount of work.

[lovelearning]

I verified. In this case, it all checked out.

You're right about the additional time in general. But for much of the information on the web, readers assume the author is speaking from genuine knowledge and has verified the information. IMO it's a better search engine than Google, especially for conceptually complex topics.