OpenAI Unveils its AI-Powered Search Engine SearchGPT

OpenAI has announced its much-anticipated entry into the search market with SearchGPT. An AI-powered search engine that promises real-time access to information across the internet. Unlike traditional search engines, SearchGPT promises an organized and intuitive presentation of search results, aiming to enhance user experience significantly.

What’s special about SearchGPT?

At the heart of SearchGPT is a large textbox inviting users to type in their queries with the prompt, “What are you looking for?”. Instead of returning a standard list of links, SearchGPT organizes and contextualizes the information.

For instance, a search for music festivals results in summarized findings, followed by brief descriptions of events and attribution links. Another example demonstrates how the engine explains the optimal planting times for tomatoes and details different plant varieties.

Users can ask follow-up questions or explore additional relevant links through a sidebar. The search engine also features “visual answers,” although specific details about this feature were not disclosed before publication.

SearchGPT Development Phase

Currently, SearchGPT is a prototype and will be accessible to only 10,000 test users at launch. According to OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood, the service is powered by the GPT-4 family of models.

OpenAI is collaborating with third-party partners and using direct content feeds to construct its search results. The ultimate goal is to integrate these search features directly into ChatGPT. This launch marks a significant move by OpenAI, potentially challenging Google, which has been incorporating AI features into its search engine to stay ahead of the competition.

SearchGPT also positions OpenAI against startup Perplexity, which is known for its AI “answer” engine. Perplexity has faced criticism for its AI summaries feature, which some publishers claimed was plagiarizing their content.

Learning From Past Missteps

OpenAI appears to have learned from these controversies. In a blog post, the company emphasized that SearchGPT was developed in collaboration with several news partners, including organizations like The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and Vox Media, the parent company of The Verge. “News partners gave valuable feedback, and we continue to seek their input,” Wood stated.

Publishers will have control over how their content appears in OpenAI’s search features. They can opt out of having their content used to train OpenAI’s models while still being featured in search results.

OpenAI assured that “SearchGPT is designed to help users connect with publishers by prominently citing and linking to them in searches,” highlighting clear, in-line, named attribution and source links for transparency and engagement.

OpenAI’s Greater Goals

Launching SearchGPT as a prototype serves multiple purposes for OpenAI. It allows the company to mitigate the impact of any inaccuracies in search results, similar to issues seen with Google’s AI Overviews. It also provides a buffer against potential misattributions or content misuse, as experienced by Perplexity.

The development of SearchGPT has been speculated for months, with reports from The Information and Bloomberg detailing its progress. OpenAI has been strategically recruiting talent from Google to bolster its search team.

The company has also been gradually enhancing ChatGPT’s ability to interact with real-time web content, starting with the “Browse with Bing” feature, although it was less advanced compared to SearchGPT.

Despite the rapid growth and popularity of ChatGPT, OpenAI faces rising operational costs. The Information recently reported that AI training and inference expenses could reach $7 billion this year.

With SearchGPT initially being free and devoid of advertisements, OpenAI will need to establish a sustainable monetization strategy soon.