Is ChatGPT Better Than Google?

With OpenAI's release of ChatGPT on Nov 2022, a lot of people was very excited to see what this "New Thing" is all about. And boy, oh boy.... This thing is mind blowing!

I have been playing with ChatGPT for a bout 2 days now and I want to share my experience and perspective between ChatGPT, a chatbot and Google, the most popular search engine.

Right off the bat, there's a HUGE difference between the two in terms of the interface. ChatGPT is clean, simple and it really feels like a chatbot (I mean, it is a chatbot after all). Unlike Google, ChatGPT informs you on it's capabilities and limitations. But you won't really know how far this thing can go as we are still at the very early stage of using this tool. With time, OpenAI will surely make more improvements and changes with the tool which will make it "Smarter" than it already is and helps more users to get their questions answered. Even the most complicated once.

In a way, ChatGPT also serves as a search engine as it also gives you generic answers to generic questions that we have.

Here's an example:

However, ChatGPT has a lot of limitations. It is unable to show real-time information like images, weather and more as it is trained on large dataset of text.

Google however, provides a lot more information with simple search. It shows pictures, texts, links, videos and more. It is very helpful of doing research and linking you to different sites and web pages.

Another biggest difference between the two is that ChatGPT seems to be "Smarter" in answering questions and it actually does things for you. It helps you build some of the instructions you give it and the codes actually works! You just have to be quite specific on what you want it to do for you.

I have seen videos of Developers building an entire application using ChatGPT and it is just amazing how it makes the lives of some people much easier.

But is ChatGPT really better than Google? Yes and No.

ChatGPT has it's own purpose. I don't believe that it is meant to replace Google as it has a lot of limitations that Google can already provide. However, it is better than Google in some areas like what I've stated above.

I do see this as a challenge for Google to innovate. With competition, Google will be forced to make a decision to either to stay the way they are or to complete with AI-based tools and chatbots just like ChatGPT. I do see this as a good opportunity to us, users to get a better experience and to have more tools and resources available to get answers from our most basic questions to the most complicated once.

But for the people in the tech industry, should you be worried about your job security? I guess that's another topic what we should discuss.