OpenAI enters search engine market, launches AI-powered SearchGPT

OpenAI has announced its highly anticipated entry into the search market with SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine designed to access real-time information across the internet. SearchGPT features a large textbox asking users, "What are you looking for?" Instead of merely returning a list of links, SearchGPT organizes and makes sense of the data. For instance, the search engine can summarize findings on global events along with attribution links. 

Once results appear, users can ask follow-up questions or click a sidebar to explore other relevant links. There is also a "visual answers" feature, though OpenAI has not yet provided detailed information on its functionality. An example of a SearchGPT query might be searching for "music festivals in Boone, North Carolina, in August 2024," where the model delivers up-to-date information from the web, including links to sources.

Currently, SearchGPT is a prototype and will initially be accessible to only 10,000 test users. Kayla Wood, an OpenAI spokesperson, mentioned that the service is powered by the GPT-4 family of models and that OpenAI is collaborating with third-party partners and using direct content feeds to generate search results with the only intention of integrating these search features directly into ChatGPT.

Is OpenAI a threat to Google search?

This move by OpenAI represents a potential threat to Google, which has been incorporating AI features into its search engine to stay ahead of competitors. It also places OpenAI in more direct competition with startups like Perplexity, which promotes itself as an AI "answer" engine but has faced criticism for allegedly copying content from publishers.

To address such concerns, OpenAI emphasizes a different approach. In a blog post, the company stated that SearchGPT was developed in collaboration with various news partners, including The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and Vox Media. Publishers will have control over how their content appears in OpenAI’s search features, and they can opt-out of having their content used to train OpenAI’s models while still appearing in searches. Responses in SearchGPT include clear, in-line attributions and links, ensuring users know the source of the information and can easily access more results via a sidebar with source links.

By releasing SearchGPT as a prototype, OpenAI mitigates potential issues with inaccuracies or attribution errors, providing a buffer against criticism. The development of SearchGPT has been speculated for months, with reports from The Information in February and further details from Bloomberg in May. During this time, OpenAI has been actively recruiting Google employees for its search team.

OpenAI Chatgpt Overview

OpenAI has been gradually enhancing ChatGPT’s ability to interact with real-time web data. Although GPT-3.5 was outdated upon release, OpenAI introduced a "Browse with Bing" feature last September to allow ChatGPT to browse the internet, which was more basic compared to the capabilities of SearchGPT.

While the rapid advancements have attracted millions of users to ChatGPT, the company faces substantial costs. Reports indicate that OpenAI’s AI training and inference expenses could reach $7 billion this year, exacerbated by the high usage of the free version of ChatGPT. SearchGPT will be free during its initial launch phase, and with no ads currently present, OpenAI will need to develop a monetization strategy soon.