Ask HN: Anyone notice ChatGPT doing Bing search instead of answering questions?

3 pointsandrewstuart3 comments

If you want an answer from the model itself instead of search results, you can frame it like: "Without looking anything up, <original request>"

For example: (today, GPT-4)

> "Who won the physics Nobel prize in 2023?" --> uses Bing & provides citation link [0]

> "Without looking anything up, who won the physics Nobel prize in 2023?" --> does not use Bing [1]

I don't know this approach will work forever, but at time of writing it has been effective for me.

I'd like to turn this off.

I'm not paying OpenAI for a subscription so it does web searches.

If I want to do web searches I'll use Google.

In the meantime I have switched back to ChatGPT 3.5 which, in so many ways, is faster and more willing to do as it is asked.

Seems like chat gpt4 is an overkill way to do web searches.