More and more I find myself keeping ChatGPT open and asking it even dumb questions that Google or DuckDuckGo could answer just as well. “If it’s 1pm in California, what time is it in Poland?” Having an ad-free, simple response is nice. This is going to completely upend the search engine business.

@manton I'm using it to ask questions that people (coworkers/spouse) might silently judge me for!

@manton "ad-free" -- this will not last long.

But it does bring up interesting economics. These chats are WAY more expensive to serve than search results. I'm not sure ads will even be able to pay enough to offer this for free forever.

@manton yes, before the end of the year string search is done is my guess.

@zorn Good point. It feels like an opportunity for new business models. ChatGPT Plus is $20/month currently.

@manton @fahrni How is this different from asking Siri? Those responses are simple and as free too.

@manton It's a nice iteration on Google's efforts to have people just type a normal sentence into the search box. But it better be things we can sanity check with what we already know, for now. https://journa.host/@jeremybmerrill/110192161748239895

@manton I would buy the first “virtual assistant”, like Siri, that does what Whisper does combined with providing an answer per GPT, with voice... Don’t even mind how accurate it is right now…

@gedeonm Most of what I ask it is way beyond what Siri can do. But even this simple example, Siri kept messing up. It pointed me to web results or the time in Poland… Ohio. Siri is not reliable for me, so I only use it when I'm in the car.

@ezellwrites It seems to understand DST so shouldn't need retraining unless we actually make DST permanent year-round. How the data can be out of date is an interesting problem for sure.

@manton
My biggest time saver so far with chatgpt has been asking it to figure out someone’s time zone based on their work email address.

@manton Honestly sometimes feels like using Siri in the car is worse in regards to safety than just tapping your phone to do whatever you need. More often than not she does something so contrary to what I asked that it becomes a big distraction while on the road.

@manton I saw an article the other day (behind a paywall, so I won't link it) where someone asked ChatGPT to explain a medieval cipher that calculated the date of Easter each year, and it explained it reasonably well. A search engine may be the one of the most potent, reliable uses for this technology. Especially when it attributes the source of the info.

@gedeonm I’m not saying Siri is always wrong but my recent experience

@bbohling Yes, we’re like 9 years in now, and it gets things wrong so often it’s embarrassing. After having reset my phone and reinstalling it, I was in the middle of a conversation with someone who have some paranoid thoughts, and it just started talking to me without me even saying Siri. I averted the situation, but that was a close call. Now I have it set up so it won’t respond to anything but me pushing the crown. 🤷🏻‍♂️

@manton I really like the integration of ChatGPT in Raycast. I have two global shortcuts: one to bring up the regular chat, and another for asking ChatGPT about my currently selected text. Big productivity boost.