You.com, a search engine that takes on Google and others like it dependent on advertising, has launched a new ChatGPT-like AI chatbot called youChat. The bot can answer questions and hold conversations very similarly to ChatGPT, but it also gains a significant feature – internet access – which greatly expands its capabilities. Internet access allows users to search about recent events. Meanwhile, ChatGPT has only been trained with data up to 2021, meaning it’s unable to answer any question regarding anything that turned up beyond that. Moreover, since youChat incorporates the You search platform, it can also provide citations for answers. Some of the things that youChat says it can help you do is “answer general questions, explain things, suggest ideas, translate, summarise text, compose emails, and write code.” However, youChat suffers from the same shortcomings that ChatGPT does, meaning it still makes mistakes. Company CEO Richard Socher does claim that youChat will be more “truthful” than other language models but it’s unclear what that precisely means. Users were quick to spot that youChat often outputs wrong information to very basic questions. Thankfully, You.com also presents search results from the web alongside youChat so it’s easy to verify the information outputted by the bot. There is another major downside to youChat. While ChatGPT has been trained to refuse to answer any potentially harmful questions, youChat is a lot more open in that regard and provides detailed instructions for queries with clear malicious intent. This is only the first version of youChat though, so it’s okay to cut it some slack. Socher also says that “this is just the beginning” and a much-improved version with even more unique features is in the pipeline.
