ChatGPT has two killer features, and one gimmick (and one real feature) that gets all the press.

The gimmick is the ability to compose (synthesize) coherent texts — write a story or essay, which is enabled by the cool feature — it’s language model, which is able to understand and generate language remarkably well

( Is ChatGPT English only?)

But the two killer features that most people are discussing are

1. It’s ability to summarize multiple sources (collected through web crawling and data training).
2. It’s ability to retain context. This is the big one. The ability to ask a question, and then ask follow up questions based on previous questions and refer back to them is the biggest feature, and the one that search engines don’t have.

ChatGPT also has one “un-feature” that makes it valuable. It’s not monetized. Google was great, and page-rank was a good algorithm, until people learned how to game the system with “SEO”. Now Google is worse than Yahoo or Lycos in 1999 with nothing but advertising and SEO spam.

People don’t have the ability (or motivation) to manipulate ChatGPT for monetary gain — yet. And that, with the three other features:

1. Language Model
2. Summarization
3. Contextual awareness

are why it’s such a big deal.