OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and the GPT language model, is getting ready to compete directly with Google. The company just launched SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine.
SearchGPT is a “temporary prototype of new AI search features” from OpenAI. ChatGPT can already pull information from the web, but usually only for context or summarizing several different sources at once, which isn’t always accurate. The initial version of SearchGPT is much more like a traditional web search from Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo, with web results displayed as list of links next to AI-generated summaries.
The main selling point for SearchGPT is that you can ask hyper-specific queries, such as “music festivals in Boone, North Carolina in August,” or follow up with additional questions based on earlier searches. Google has tried to offer similar functionality with its AI Overviews, which were scaled back after they told people to eat glue and rocks. Microsoft is also starting to roll out more AI upgrades for Bing—there are no reports yet of Bing telling people to eat weird items, but that could very well happen.
OpenAI said in a blog post, “Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results. 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.”
OpenAI also says it is “committed to a thriving ecosystem of publishers and creators,” which is a bizarre statement to make after it scraped the content of countless websites without permission or compensation to train its AI and make billions in profit. Many sites and publishers started blocking ChatGPT as soon as OpenAI created an opt-out mechanism, and it’s not clear how many of them will be on board with OpenAI’s attempt at a search engine.
OpenAI now has different user agents (which can act as opt-out mechanisms) for AI training, SearchGPT, and user searches in ChatGPT. For example, some sites might allow the search engine but continue to block AI training. We’ll have to see how that works out in the months and years ahead. Some publishers and sites have escalated to IP address blocks and other prevention methods against AI companies, especially after Perplexity (another AI search engine) was caught indexing sites that explicitly opted out of indexing.
SearchGPT is currently a private beta, and you can sign up for the waitlist on the ChatGPT website.
Source: OpenAI
