OpenAI on Thursday enhanced its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot with search engine capabilities, as the startup looks to overtake Google’s decades-long dominance in web search.
The company said the upgrade enables users to get “fast, timely answers” with links to relevant web sources – information that was previously required using traditional search engines.
Key upgrades to ChatGPT enable AI chatbots to provide real-time information from across the web.
ChatGPIT’s homepage can now also provide tabs directly to source content on topics ranging from weather forecasts and stock prices to sports scores and breaking news, the company said.
These will link to news and data from providers that have signed content deals with OpenAI, including France’s Le Monde, Germany’s Axel Springer and the UK’s Financial Times.
Examples of the new interface shown on the OpenAI website are very similar to search results on Google and Google Maps, although without the clutter of advertising.
They also resemble the interface of Perplexity, another AI-powered search engine that offers a more conversational version of Google with sources referenced in answers.
Both OpenAI and Perplexity are facing lawsuits from The New York Times for scraping or linking to copyrighted material without permission.
Rather than launch a separate product, OpenAI has integrated search directly into ChatGPT for paying customers, though it will be expanded to users who use the free version of the chatbot.
Users can enable the search feature by default or activate it manually through the web search icon.
The company said that any website or publisher can choose to appear in ChatGPT’s search results, with OpenAI actively seeking feedback from content creators to further refine the system.
‘Favorite Feature’
Since their launch, data on AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Cloud has been limited by time cutoffs, so the answers provided were not up to date.
This has been seen as a weakness of AI chatbots, especially OpenAI, which does not have a standalone search engine providing more timely data. In contrast, both Google and Microsoft combine AI answers with web results.
For now, the feature will not include advertising, allowing ChatGPT to provide cleaner results than Google.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on
“I find this to be a faster/easier way to get the information I’m looking for,” Altman said on Reddit.
The launch will raise more questions about the startup’s links with Microsoft, a major OpenAI investor, which is also trying to expand the reach of its Bing search engine against Google.
Altman has led his company on the path to becoming an Internet powerhouse.
He successfully led the company to an astonishing valuation of $157 billion in a recent round of fundraising, which included Microsoft, Tokyo-based conglomerate SoftBank and AI chip maker Nvidia as investors.
Enticing new users with search engine capabilities will increase the company’s computing needs and costs, which are extremely high.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
