OpenAI said on Thursday it is putting its artificial intelligence engine to work to challenge Google’s market-dominant search engine.
The startup behind ChatGPT announced it is testing a “SearchGPT” prototype, designed to “combine the power of our AI models with information from the web” to quickly answer online questions and provide relevant sources.
OpenAI said in a blog post that SearchGPT is being made available to a small group of users and publishers to get feedback.
According to the San Francisco-based company, the refined search features in the prototype will be incorporated into ChatGPT in the future.
OpenAI said users will be able to interact with SearchGPT through conversational questions, and ask follow-up questions, just like they might when talking to a person.
Google recently added AI-generated query result summaries — called “overviews” — to its search engine, prompting concerns among some that the move will result in fewer money-making advertising opportunities.
This new feature presents written text at the top of results for Google searches, ahead of traditional links to sites, that summarizes information that the engine believes answers the user’s search query.
OpenAI’s description of SearchGPT seemed similar to Google’s overviews.
Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, companies in the space have been engaged in a frantic race to deploy generative AI programs to produce text, images, and other content through signs in everyday language.
“We’re innovating at every level of the AI stack,” Google chief Sundar Pichai said this week during an earnings call for parent company Alphabet (which he also heads).
OpenAI said it is working with some publishers to refine SearchGPT, which is being kept separate from the training of its generative AI foundation models.
“AI search is going to become a major way for people to navigate the internet, and in these early days it’s critical that the technology is built in a way that values, respects, and protects journalism and publishers,” Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson said in an OpenAI blog post.
“We look forward to partnering with OpenAI in this process.”
OpenAI has invited users to sign up to a waitlist to try out SearchGPT.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
