After months of speculation about its search ambitions, OpenAI has revealed SearchGPTa “prototype” search engine that could eventually facilitate the company grab a piece of Google’s profitable business.
OpenAI said the modern tool will facilitate users find what they’re looking for faster and easier by using generative AI to gather links and respond to user queries in a conversational tone. SearchGPT could eventually be integrated with OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT. In addition to broader web search, the search engine will operate information provided by publishers who have signed agreements giving OpenAI access to their data.
Kayla Wood, a spokeswoman for OpenAI, declined to provide a demo of SearchGPT or do an interview with WIRED about the modern tool, but she confirmed that the company has already granted access to anonymous partners and publishers and has improved parts of the search engine based on their feedback.
Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, was one of the first companies to publicly release a generative AI search engine when it launched an AI-powered version of Bing in 2023 that relied on OpenAI’s immense language models. That Microsoft AI search experience has since been rebranded as Copilot.
Since then, a number of competitors, including Google and Perplexity, have launched their own AI search experiences for users. Google’s AI Digests provides AI-generated summaries of articles, often at the top of news results. OpenAI’s SearchGPT seems more similar to Perplexity’s approach, in which a chatbot provides an accompanying list of relevant links, and the user can ask additional questions.
After OpenAI first launched ChatGPT in November 2022, early users saw the chatbot’s ability to search and summarize information from the web as a potential replacement for conventional web search. But the shortcomings of immense language models make chatbots imperfect search tools. These models rely on training data that’s often months or years out of date, and when they’re unsure of the answer, they make up facts.
Microsoft’s early efforts with Bing were far from successful, with the AI-powered search engine producing odd, inappropriate, and incorrect answers. Bing’s market share only grew slightly after the overhaul.
When Google added AI Overviews to its search results in May, the company quickly ran into reliability issues, including recommending people add pizza glue. OpenAI’s SearchGPT can operate an approach to generative AI called augmented retrieval generation, which is the industry standard for search AI and aims to reduce the incidence of hallucinations in chatbot responses. With the RAG approach, the AI tool references trusted information, such as a preferred news site, while generating its output and linking back to where the data came from.
There’s also the issue of potential copyright infringement. Perplexity in particular has been criticized by publications including WIRED for copying aspects of original journalism with its AI search tool and seemingly ignoring requests not to pull content from certain sites. In a blog post on OpenAI, the company mentions its commitment to publishers: “SearchGPT aims to help users connect with publishers by prominently citing and linking to them in searches.” Many companies, including Vox Media, Atlantic, Corp NewsAND “Financial Times”signed licensing agreements with OpenAI this year.