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Newegg released its PC Builder ChatGPT Plugin yesterday, and former TPU writer—Francisco Pires—decided to put it through the proverbial ringer. His hands-on adventures with AI-assisted PC build suggestions were documented in a Tom's Hardware article. Initial impressions are a mixed bag—he brings in a metaphor to describe his experience: "it was akin to entering Alice in Wonderland (the Tim Burton version): everything's interesting and somewhat faithful, but laid out in just the wrong way." The beta version (released back in March) proved to be a confusing mess, according to Avram Piltch, Editor-in-Chief at Tom's Hardware.
Pires proposed that the tool is decent enough for fledgling PC build novices to utilize, but the chatbot was found to overvalue certain components: "the typical price for the Radeon RX 6700 XT hovers around the $330-$370 range so the $558.99 MSI card the bot recommends is overpriced by more than $230!" The assistant also struggled to keep a suggested system build within a specified $1000 budget, the total was stretched to $1123.09. He also discovered some quirks related to the assistant's (apparently) incomplete GPU model database: "why did ChatGPT suggest a GeForce RTX 4060 for the build, if its knowledge cut-off is set at September 2021?" The plugin seems to have scraped information about newer products from Newegg's store, but the bot's full text answer (see the attached screenshot) provides a comparison between older generations.
He concludes that: "Newegg's ChatGPT plugin is a nice technical achievement, but it's not helpful enough right now to replace advice from expert humans or save you the trouble of doing your own research. Perhaps a future version will give better quality results, but as long as the advice is coming from a single retailer, you'll have to be wary of bias in favor of inventory that the vendor wants to move." The Tom's Hardware best PC builds guide gets a shout out earlier on in the article—perhaps their readers are best advised to head over there, since Newegg's ChatGPT Plugin is in need of further optimizations.
View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source
Pires proposed that the tool is decent enough for fledgling PC build novices to utilize, but the chatbot was found to overvalue certain components: "the typical price for the Radeon RX 6700 XT hovers around the $330-$370 range so the $558.99 MSI card the bot recommends is overpriced by more than $230!" The assistant also struggled to keep a suggested system build within a specified $1000 budget, the total was stretched to $1123.09. He also discovered some quirks related to the assistant's (apparently) incomplete GPU model database: "why did ChatGPT suggest a GeForce RTX 4060 for the build, if its knowledge cut-off is set at September 2021?" The plugin seems to have scraped information about newer products from Newegg's store, but the bot's full text answer (see the attached screenshot) provides a comparison between older generations.
He concludes that: "Newegg's ChatGPT plugin is a nice technical achievement, but it's not helpful enough right now to replace advice from expert humans or save you the trouble of doing your own research. Perhaps a future version will give better quality results, but as long as the advice is coming from a single retailer, you'll have to be wary of bias in favor of inventory that the vendor wants to move." The Tom's Hardware best PC builds guide gets a shout out earlier on in the article—perhaps their readers are best advised to head over there, since Newegg's ChatGPT Plugin is in need of further optimizations.
View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source
