A prototype is available, though it’s Chrome-only and English-only at the moment. How this’ll work is you select some text and then click on the extension, which will try to “return the relevant quote and inference for the user, along with links to article and quality signals”.
How this works is it uses ChatGPT to generate a search query, utilizes WP’s search API to search for relevant article text, and then uses ChatGPT to extract the relevant part.
It’s going to hit an index, not the actual data, it’s going to return approximate and not accurate results. Tons of engineering been done around basic search precisely to get more data locality.
Read a blog post at some time (please don’t ask me where) talking about Bing vs. Google when Bing started to use ChatGPT and it basically boiled down to “Google has the tech to do it, they don’t roll it out because they don’t want to eat the electricity bill this is MS spending money to get market share”. The cost difference in providing search vs. having ChatGPT answer a question was something like 10x. It might not be that way forever what with beating models down to work in trinary and stuff, though (that’s not just massive quantisation but also much easier maths, convolutions don’t need much maths when all you deal with is -1, 0, 1 IIRC you can throw out the multiplication unit and work with nothing but shifts and adds)