· You.com's YouChat goes live
YouChat went live and would show its sources, if you asked
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On December 23, 2022, Richard Socher of the search startup You.com posted that YouChat was going live that day. Synthedia, which covered the launch, quoted the tweet and its time stamp: 6:05 PM. The day before Christmas Eve is a funny time to ship anything. They shipped anyway.
What YouChat was
YouChat was a chat box on top of a search engine. You asked it a question in plain words and it wrote back an answer, the way ChatGPT did. The difference was the connection to live search. ChatGPT at the time worked from training data and had no internet access, so it couldn't tell you what happened yesterday. YouChat could talk about current events, and it could point to where its answers came from.
Voicebot.ai's write-up on December 28 described it as running on a large language model like the GPT-3.5 model behind ChatGPT, and said it could answer questions, write text, and suggest edits to your writing. Both reviews were honest about the rough edges. It sometimes lost track of the conversation after a few turns, especially if you changed subjects. It sometimes gave outdated or wrong answers. Synthedia's reviewer caught it naming Jack Dorsey as Twitter's CEO, while You.com's regular search results got the same question right.
And there's the detail I keep coming back to. Synthedia found that YouChat didn't always return sources on its own, but it reliably did when you explicitly asked.
The lesson hiding in that review
That small note is the most useful thing in either article. A tool that could cite sources often didn't, until someone typed the request.
That's still true of plenty of chatbots. Many will happily show where an answer came from, but default to a clean paragraph with nothing to check. People read that clean paragraph as confidence. It isn't. It's just formatting.
So I'd make the request a reflex for anything factual.
Before:
What's the return policy for most big US electronics stores?After:
What's the return policy at the three biggest US electronics
retailers? For each one, link the page you got it from. If you
can't find a current source, say so instead of guessing.R.Solace writes about prompts the way a shop owner talks about orders: what you ask for is what you get.