OpenAI Just Announced a Search Engine, SearchGPT, but There’s a Catch [CNET]

Maybe you already think of ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot, as a search engine — after all, you can type in queries similar to those you might put into Google or Bing. But now OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has announced it’s testing a prototype of its own search engine, called SearchGPT.

“Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results,” the company said in a post on Thursday. “We believe that by enhancing the conversational capabilities of our models with real-time information from the web, finding what you’re looking for can be faster and easier.”

Read more: Microsoft Joins Google With Generative Search, But This Time With a Twist

AI chatbots draw on immense amounts of what’s known as training data from a variety of sources, including the internet. But often there’s a cutoff date that’s months in the past. ChatGPT’s free version, for instance, lacks knowledge of current events and other up-to-date information. 

That’s clearly something OpenAI is trying to address. “SearchGPT will quickly and directly respond to your questions with up-to-date information from the web while giving you clear links to relevant sources,” the company said in its statement Thursday, adding that users can ask follow-up questions to their queries for richer information.  

Meanwhile, there’s Google, the kingpin of search, which accounts for some 90% of internet search activity — and which has its own AI chatbot, Gemini. Google in May started augmenting standard search results with what it calls AI Overviews, Gemini-powered summaries that show up above the standard set of links. AI Overviews returned some embarrassing results at first, but Google quickly regrouped and its search pages now regularly show AI Overviews.

On Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled its own approach to blending AI and search, called Bing generative search. For now, Microsoft says, it’s available to only “a small percentage of user queries.”

As for OpenAI’s SearchGPT, you can’t try it out now — you’ll need to sign up for the wait list for the product, which the company eventually expects to integrate into ChatGPT.

OpenAI would do well to tread carefully as it moves into the search world. One AI search engine, Perplexity, recently came under fire for allegedly stealing content from publications including Wired and Forbes. Perplexity’s CEO told the Associated Press that the company “never ripped off content from anybody,” and a company representative told CNET in June that Perplexity is developing a revenue-sharing program for media companies.

OpenAI already has been hit with legal action over the training data it’s fed to ChatGPT. The New York Times in December filed a lawsuit against the AI startup and Microsoft, alleging they are “using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it.”

In its statement, OpenAI said the company is working with publishers and creators and that the search engine will prominently cite and link to news sources. It also quotes Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson as saying his publication looks forward to partnering with OpenAI’s search efforts.

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