I was surprised at the highly negative reaction to the factual errors in Google’s answer to ChatGPT. It should not have come as a surprise at all.
Those of us who have been playing with ChatGPT know that it has at best an indifferent attitude toward whether its highly confident answers are correct or not.
What Google is demonstrating with Bard was that they are at the same place as their competition in the development of chatbots for Web search. We already knew that much work needs to be done to marry the verbal facility of chatbots with the degree of trust that we place in search engines.
Yes, it’s a work in progress, this effort to infuse chatbot answers with true provenance. But it’s a really fascinating work in progress, isn’t it?