[anonytrary]

This is a great way to formulate the difference. In my mind, Google does search, which is not the same as synthesis. ChatGPT is a synthesis engine. I think there is room for engines like ChatGPT to also return links to the training documents that were most relevant to producing an answer. At that point, it would be doing search and synthesis at the same time.

I am not sure if neural networks have been trained to do this yet, but it would be very cool to see a network that produces both generated output and the most relevant input data that led to that output, by somehow keeping track of the influence certain inputs have on various learned features and internal structure of the network. I think of this as an index.

You make a good point about SEO. SEO is going to be obsolete in the near future. The SEO game is basically an adversarial attack on Google, which Google itself actually promotes and encourages website builders to do! In the future, we are going to look back on the cat-and-mouse game of SEO and see it as primitive and antithetical to the goal of search.

[datpiff]

> ChatGPT is a synthesis engine

This is exactly what ChatGPT cannot do!