Just to give a sense of scale: OpenAI started with a $1 billion donation, got another $1B as investment, and is now getting a larger investment from Microsoft (undisclosed but rumored to be $10B). Assuming they spent most of their previous funding, which seems likely, their operational costs are in the ballpark of $300 million per year. The idea that the WMF could just choose to create conversational software of a similar quality if it wanted seems detached from reality to me.
Without spending billions on LLM development to aim for a conversational chatbot trying to pass a Turing test, we could definitely try to catch up to the state of the art in search results. Our search currently does a pretty bad job (in terms of recall especially). Today's featured article in English is the Hot Chip album "Made in the Dark", and if I enter anything but the exact article title the typeahead results are woefully incomplete or wrong. If I ask an actual question, good luck.
Google is feeling vulnerable to OpenAI here in part because everyone can see that their results are often full of low quality junk created for SEO, while ChatGPT just gives a concise answer right there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menu_(2022_film) is one of the top viewed English articles. If I search "The Menu reviews" the Google results are noisy and not so great. ChatGPT actually gives you nothing relevant because it doesn't know anything from 2022. If we could just manage to display the three sentence snippet of our article about the critical response section of the article, it would be awesome. It's too bad that the whole "knowledge engine" debacle poisoned the well when it comes to a Wikipedia search engine, because we could definitely do a lot to learn from what people like about ChatGPT and apply to Wikipedia search.
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