Does this thing ever say "I do not know" ?
Only if you ask it a question about something where that thing had a lot of people saying I don't know in the training data.
There is work being done to improve AI and it's ability to check its own facts and then respond based on it's confidence in them.
but yeah, it's a work in progress.
It's hard because there's a lot of wrong info that it gets trained on because the datasets are way too huge to human review. And even if you could human review them, humans don't agree most of the time.
Why use ChatGPT when a search engine would do perfectly, while at least showing you what the source of the information is?
- It's often hard to sift through all the info when searching or find the right search query.
AI provides an interface that improves this by an insane amount. Once you have the AI answer you have a lot more info to use for crafting your search to find more technical/factual info if you need it.
- Sometimes you are just refreshing your memory or just looking for a rough idea about something, and you're not worried about it saying something wrong because you will know instantly.