Al chatbots aren't search enginesthey're crypto bros

Don't trust 'em.

- BRAD CHACOS

Over the last few months, Al chatbots have exploded in popularity off the surging success of OpenAl's O revolutionary ChatGPT-which, amazingly, only burst onto the scene around December (fave.co/3wnujwM). But when Microsoft seized the opportunity to hitch its wagon to OpenAl's rising star for a steep $10 billion dollars (fave.co/3L4Czn3), it chose to do so by introducing a GPT-4-powered chatbot under the guise of Bing, its swell-but-also-ran search engine, in a bid to upend Google's search dominance. Google quickly followed suit with its own homegrown Bard Al.

Both are touted as experiments. And these "Al chatbots" are truly wondrous advancements I've spent many nights with my kids joyously creating fantastic stuff-of your-dreams artwork (fave.co/40aXZTV) with Bing Chat’s Dall-E integration and prompting sick raps about wizards who think lizards are the source of all magic, and seeing them come to life in mere moments with these fantastic tools. I love ‘em.

But Microsoft and Google’s (fave. co/3MQyrsc) marketing got it wrong. AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Google Bard shouldn’t be lumped in with search engines at all. They’re more like those crypto bros (fave.co/3L4AV4C), clogging up the comments in Elon Musk’s terrible new Twitter (fave.co/3BRTaFv), loudly and confidently braying truthy-sounding statements that in reality are often full of absolute bullshit.

These so-called “AI chatbots” do a fantastic job of synthesizing information and providing entertaining, oft-accurate details about whatever you query. But under the hood, they’re actually large-language models, or LLMs (fave.co/3mMseCG), trained on billions or even trillions of points of data—text—that they learn from in order to anticipate which words