OpenAI Announces SearchGPT, Its AI-Powered Search Engine

OpenAI announces the long-awaited entry into the search engine market, SearchGPTan AI-powered search engine with real-time access to information from across the Internet.

The search engine starts with a huge text box that asks the user, “What are you looking for?” But instead of returning a uncomplicated list of links, SearchGPT tries to organize them and make sense of them. In one example from OpenAI, the search engine summarizes its findings about music festivals, then presents brief descriptions of the events, followed by an attribution link.

In another example, he explains when to plant tomatoes before breaking down the different varieties of the plant. After viewing the results, you can ask additional questions or click the sidebar to open other relevant links. There is also a feature called “visual answers,” but OpenAI has not returned to Edge before publication, on how exactly it works.

SearchGPT is still just a “prototype” for now. The service is powered by the GPT-4 family of models and will be available to just 10,000 test users at launch, OpenAI spokeswoman Kayla Wood says Edge. Wood says OpenAI is working with external partners and using direct content feeds to build its search results. The goal is to eventually integrate search directly into ChatGPT.

It’s the start of what could become a major threat to Google, which has rushed to introduce AI features to its search engine out of concern that users would flock to competing products that offer these tools first. It also puts OpenAI in more direct competition with startup Perplexity, which bills itself as an AI “answer” engine. Perplexity recently came under fire for its AI summaries feature, which publishers he claimed that he had directly copied their work.

OpenAI appears to have taken notice of the backlash and is saying it is taking a distinctly different approach. In a blog post, the company emphasized that SearchGPT was developed in collaboration with a variety of news partners, which include organizations like the owners of Wall Street Journal, Press Associationand Vox Media, the parent company Edge“We’ve received valuable feedback from our news partners and continue to seek their input,” Wood says.

Publishers will be able to “manage how they appear in OpenAI search features,” the company writes. They can opt out of having their content used to train OpenAI models and still appear in search.

“SearchGPT is designed to help users engage with publishers by explicitly citing and linking to them in searches,” according to an OpenAI blog post. “The answers have clear, built-in, named attributions and links, so users know where the information came from and can quickly interact with even more results in a sidebar with source links.”

Providing your search engine as a prototype helps OpenAI in a few different ways. First, if SearchGPT’s results are wildly incorrect—like when Google introduced AI Overviews and told us to put glue on a pizza—it’s easier to say, well, it’s a prototype! There’s also the potential for misattribution, or perhaps wholesale ripping off of articles, as Perplexity has been accused of.

This modern product has been talked about for months now, information reporting about its development in February and then Bloomberg reporting more in May. At the same time, we reported that OpenAI was aggressively trying to poach Google employees for its search team. Some X users also noticed a new website that OpenAI was working on suggested this change.

OpenAI is slowly bringing ChatGPT closer to the real-time web. When GPT-3.5 was released, the AI ​​model was already a few months out of date. Last September, OpenAI released a way for ChatGPT to browse the web, called Browse with Bing, but it seems much more primitive than SearchGPT.

OpenAI’s rapid progress has brought ChatGPT millions of users, but the company’s costs are rising. information reported this week that OpenAI’s AI training and inference costs could reach $7 billion this year, and the millions of users of the free version of ChatGPT will only drive up the computing costs even further. SearchGPT will be free at launch, and since the feature currently appears to have no ads, it’s clear the company will need to find a way to monetize it soon.