[jsnell]

You're making the assumption that quality is the only feature that matters, rather than it being a multi- dimensional tradeoff where we don't know at all what tradeoffs consumers actually prefer. For example, a smaller model will run faster, right?

At this exact moment, ChatGPT is giving me about a word every 2-3 seconds. It's basically useless. But even when the system is not overloaded, there's a noticeable delay.

How much quality would you be willing to trade off to get results instantly instead? Or the inverse, how much better would the results need to be to justify a 5x longer processing time? It seems hard to believe that ChatGPT happened to be released at exactly the optimal tradeoff. (And obviously it's also unlikely that Google launched with exactly the right tradeoff.)

[goldfeld]

Basically useless? I use it to write articles for me[0], hardly could a human turn text around as fast, and I both do not pay it nor owe it anything. It could be slower still, and if you went back just 5 years to 2018 it would seem a miracle to our past selves, just for the quality output.

[0]: https://generativereview.substack.com/p/the-generative-revie...

[pretext-1]

I think OP meant useless for search

[moolcool]

Try Bing though, based on GPT-4. That's their real competition, and it beats the pants off Google.

[schrodinger]

I agree it’s currently better because OpenAI GPT4 is better, but it does feel like a bolt on to the search engine since it used the AI to come up with search terms and then summarize the results. Googles Bard seems to be more integrated with their search index which could mean it’s better in the long run once their LLM catches up.

[sottol]

Not only quality, Google probably also has to worry about environmental impact. Maybe that will be their "angle of attack" on chatgpt if they get roughly to parity in terms of usefulness.