For factual information -- use Bing Chat

Guardian recently published an article

ChatGPT is making up fake Guardian articles. Here’s how we’re responding.

The reporter couldn’t remember writing the specific piece, but the headline certainly sounded like something they would have written. It was a subject they were identified with and had a record of covering. Worried that there may have been some mistake at our end, they asked colleagues to go back through our systems to track it down. Despite the detailed records we keep of all our content, and especially around deletions or legal issues, they could find no trace of its existence.

Why? Because it had never been written.

Two days ago our archives team was contacted by a student asking about another missing article from a named journalist. There was again no trace of the article in our systems. The source? ChatGPT.

I think people has been using it wrong. For any factual information, use Bing Chat. For literature search, use perplexity (and many other tools). For single document querying, use Bing Chat.

Note that factual information may also mean internet links related to codes, say, git links or repository links (if you are working with linux). You should always check it the links are real before you execute them on your system!

For multiple document querying.... There's a plethora of those. No code ones are humata and petal. But I prefer to use my own OpenAI API with selfhosted document querying app. This way, I can upload and embed as many docs as I want (but I still need to pay for the API cost). I think we'll have to wait a few years before selfhosted "GPTs" (the term GPT actually belong to OpenAI, we should just use LLM) take off and we can embed our docs for free! Amen. But if you want to play around with these selfhosted (already fine tuned) models just Google vicuna or gpt4all.

At the moment, ChatGPT is not yet primed for factual info generation. But, they're developing the plugins and will connect them with wolfram alpha, which would make them a google killer. Except if Bard is working harder...

Now, this is what Bing Chat answered when I told him... it... to explain the annulment of the Water Law by the Constitutional Court. No need to hire extra research assistant, it gives you sources and generate the explanation in a few second....

So, what's the use of ChatGPT? Oh, plenty..., it is best for text and code generation...but you'll need a (few) good prompt...