Thoughts on GPT's Integration into Bing Search

GPT Still Lacks Freshness

The jump from ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) to GPT-4 were huge in terms of its ability to interpret human generated prompts and the quality of its output. This effectively shrinks the gap between maximum quality - of course there's always room for improvement, but that's another topic. Point is, GPT-4 got WAY closer to ideal output than 3.5, leaving less room for output growth in v5.

However, there's one big thing still missing, freshness. GPT-4's knowledge cutoff remains unchanged from its predecessor.

But What's That Got To Do With Bing?

Bing recently rolled out the Chat integration into its engine for all users, but a quick scan of the citations they're using shows that it's referencing articles from before September 2021. Most of these articles you won't find in the first page of SERPs for that same query, largely because search algos reward freshness.

It's also in a separate tab, which leads me to believe they're gauging usage, adoption rates, etc. before full SERP integration. Then couple that with the lack of freshness, why bother baking that right into the primary search results.

What Does it All Mean???

I think with GPT-5, which is obviously a ways out still, we'll see the big improvement focused on freshness of its knowledge. Possibly even live. It makes sense for that to be a (maybe the the) next step for the Bing & OpenAI partnership. OpenAI has the LLM, Bing has the crawler, perfect combination.