Did your dad ever search online trying to learn new things about the software? I've seen the experience you describe happen with people spontaneously discovering Ctrl+L and Ctrl+R in bash, e.g. in a comment here on HN. They could have found it years ago if they'd searched for "list of bash features" or whatever.
My point is that your example is not necessarily more than "a better search engine" (with all caveats about it not being "search"). People are asking ChatGPT things that they could have searched for previously. Some of it is because it can provide a better search-like experience, for sure. Some of it is, "let me play with my new toy", and getting answers the old toy could have given you.
I'm addressing your specific example, not making a blanket comment on LLM intelligence. And to clarify, I've also used these models in ways I could have before, for both of those reasons. They do offer a productivity boost.
I have tried to help him with that software before. It's in a niche CNC manufacturing type industry. You can find people discussing problems in forums sometimes, but even that was always sparse. Honestly I don't think you could even find proper docs for that software. I even tried asking chatgpt where to get the documentation for what it was telling us and it basically just said the help file in the program, but we looked and it was nowhere near as helpful as chatgpt answers. I don't know where it pulled all that info to be honest.
But even if it was out there, the ease at which it gave great answers that fit exactly what we threw at it made it 10x more (or more) valuable than spam filled and loosely related google results.
My point is that your example is not necessarily more than "a better search engine" (with all caveats about it not being "search"). People are asking ChatGPT things that they could have searched for previously. Some of it is because it can provide a better search-like experience, for sure. Some of it is, "let me play with my new toy", and getting answers the old toy could have given you.
I'm addressing your specific example, not making a blanket comment on LLM intelligence. And to clarify, I've also used these models in ways I could have before, for both of those reasons. They do offer a productivity boost.