OpenAI on Thursday announced its most direct threat yet to its stalwart Big Tech rivals: a search engine that uses artificial intelligence baked in from the beginning.
The company is testing SearchGPT, which will combine its AI technology with real-time information from the web to allow people to search for information in the same way they talk to ChatGPT. While the search engine is currently in an early test for a limited number of users, OpenAI said it plans to integrate the tools into ChatGPT in the future.
With the new feature, OpenAI will be directly competing with Google, which has for years dominated the online search market but has scrambled to keep pace with the AI arms race that OpenAI kicked off when it launched ChatGPT in November 2022. SearchGPT could also pose a threat to Microsoft’s Bing, the also-ran search engine player that last year incorporated OpenAI’s own technology in an effort to better compete with Google.
With SearchGPT, users will be able to ask questions in natural language – the same way they talk with ChatGPT – and they’ll receive answers that they can then follow up on with additional questions. But unlike ChatGPT, which is often reliant on older data to generate its answers, SearchGPT will provide up-to-date information, with online links to what the company says are “clear and relevant sources.”
For example, a demo clip shared by the company shows SearchGPT answering a query about the “best tomatoes to grow in Minnesota” with information about tomato varietals, as well as links to sites like “The Garden Magazine” and “The Gardening Dad.”
The tool will also show a sidebar with additional links to relevant information – not totally unlike the ten blue links users are used to seeing on Google Search results pages.
“Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results,” the company said in a blog post. “We believe that by enhancing the conversational capabilities of our models with real-time information from the web, finding what you’re looking for can be faster and easier.”
The OpenAI search engine could cement generative AI — technology that can create original text, as well as other types of media — as the future of finding answers online, after Google and others have experimented with early efforts to incorporate chatbots and AI-generated answers into the search experience. But that future is not assured, given AI tools’ propensity to confidently assert false information with no indication that it may be incorrect or misleading.
OpenAI’s new tool comes after Google in May rolled out new AI-generated summaries to top some search results pages so users don’t have to click through multiple links to get quick answers to their questions. Google quickly pulled back on use of the feature after it provided false, and in some cases totally nonsensical, information, in response to some users’ queries.
The rollout of Google’s tool also raised concerns among some news publishers, who worried that the AI summaries could cannibalize their web traffic by removing the need for users to visit their sites to get information — and similar concerns could arise with OpenAI’s search engine.
However, OpenAI said Thursday that it partnered with publishers to build the tool and give them options to “manage how they appear” in SearchGPT’s results. It added that sites can appear in SearchGPT even if they’ve opted out of having their content be used to train the company’s AI models.
