> ChatGPT is awesome, but it is obviously hamstrung by the fact that it crawled the web at the end of 2021, so all of its data is essentially "frozen" and it doesn't "know" of any topics that occurred after 2021
I think this could be a feature. Things on the internet have a life cycle. After a while they can be altered to fit various agendas or just drowned out by seo nonsense. Seeing an immutable snapshot in time might be a good defense of that.
For the large proportion of search queries that are "give me context for $newsitem", "what is $latestthing", "what is $celebrity up to", "can you solve my problem with the latest version of x" it's a show stopping bug (frankly Google weighting established content higher in most contexts is already an issue for the last of those queries: Googling error messages etc).
And at least all the SEO'd "Best Items In $CurrentYear" articles that aren't that up to date attempt to look current
I'm not sure if, from the perspective of consumers, it's a feature or a bug. Sort of the only thing keeping ChatGPT or equivalent from being a massive blogspam creator that puts mostly young writers cranking out content for pennies out on the street is that it can only create relatively evergreen content.
I think [Chat]GPT's output is very well represented in blogspam pages I've seen recently, so consumers get the worst of both worlds: just because it's too out of date to properly answer your question directly doesn't mean it can't help other people generate filler text that outranks pages with the answer in web search...
I think this could be a feature. Things on the internet have a life cycle. After a while they can be altered to fit various agendas or just drowned out by seo nonsense. Seeing an immutable snapshot in time might be a good defense of that.