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Sam Altman's OpenAI is taking on Google with a new search engine that uses its artificial intelligence technology.
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CNN
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OpenAI on Thursday unveiled a search engine that uses built-in artificial intelligence that poses the most direct threat yet to a powerful rival of big tech companies.
The company is testing SearchGPT, which combines its AI technology with real-time information from the web to help people search for information in the same way they would talk to a human. ChatGPT. The search engine is currently OpenAI said it was initial testing with a limited number of users and plans to integrate the tool into ChatGPT in the future.
The new features put OpenAI in direct competition with Google, which has long dominated the online search market but is desperate to keep up in the AI arms race that OpenAI kicked off with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. SearchGPT could also pose a threat to Microsoft's Bing, a late-comer search engine that adopted OpenAI's own technology last year to better compete with Google.
SearchGPT allows users to ask questions in natural language, just like they would converse with ChatGPT, and once they receive an answer, they can continue asking further questions in response. But unlike ChatGPT, which often relies on outdated data to generate answers, SearchGPT provides up-to-date information along with online links to sources that the company calls “clear and relevant sources.”
For example, a demo clip shared by the company shows SearchGPT answering the query “best tomatoes to grow in Minnesota” with information about tomato varieties and links to sites like “The Garden Magazine” and “The Gardening Dad.”
The tool also displays a sidebar with additional links to related information, just like the 10 blue links users are accustomed to seeing on a Google search results page.
“Getting answers on the web can be effortless and often requires multiple tries to get relevant results,” the company said in a blog post. “By enhancing our model's conversational capabilities with real-time information from the web, we think it will be faster and easier for you to find what you're looking for.”
After Google and other companies experimented with early efforts to incorporate chatbots and AI-generated answers into their search experiences, the OpenAI search engine may establish generative AI — technology that can create original text and other types of media — as the future of answer-finding online. But that future is far from guaranteed, given AI tools’ tendency to confidently claim misinformation without hinting that it may be inaccurate or misleading.
OpenAI's new tool comes after Google in May introduced a feature that showed new AI-generated summaries at the top of some search result pages to help users avoid clicking multiple links to get a quick answer to their question. Google quickly stopped using the feature after it gave incorrect, and in some cases completely meaningless, information for some users' questions.
The introduction of Google's tool has also raised concerns among some news publishers, who fear that AI summarization could reduce web traffic by preventing users from needing to visit their sites for information. Similar concerns could arise with OpenAI's search engine.
But OpenAI said Thursday it was partnering with publishers to build tools to give them options to “control how they appear” in SearchGPT search results, adding that sites that opt out of having their content used to train the company's AI models may still appear on SearchGPT.
