OpenAI announced SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine that has real-time access to information across the internet.
The SearchGPT starts with a large simple text box just like ChatGPT that asks the users “What are you looking for?” When users search through it, it doesn’t give out just a plain old list of links. The new SearchGPT tries to organize and make sense of the data from those links.
For example, it finds all the music festivals in Boone, North Carolina in August. It then lists all the music festivals along with little summaries of the music festivals. It also gives an attribution link in the list for users to go and check out the original page.
The company showed many such examples of what SearchGPT could do. For now, the service is just a prototype and is powered by the GPT-4 family of models.
At launch, it will only be available to 10,000 test users. They say that they are working with third-party partners and using direct content feeds to build their search results. The ultimate goal of this project is to integrate this directly into ChatGPT.
This could be a serious competitor to Google. In the last few years, Google has rushed to include AI technology in its search engine. They fear that users will flock to the competing products that will offer the tools first. It also puts OpenAI into direct competition with another AI firm, Perplexity.
Perplexity got in trouble recently for its new feature called AI summaries that publishers claimed was directly ripping off from their work. OpenAI will also have to face this threat in the future if they are to compete in this space.
For now, OpenAI seems to be taking a different approach to things. They emphasized that SearchGPT will work with various news partners like The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and Vox Media, the parent company of The Verge. According to them, “News partners gave valuable feedback, and we continue to seek their input.”
