OpenAI announces SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine: All You Need Know.

OpenAI announces its much-anticipated entry into the search market: SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine that provides real-time access to content throughout the internet.

The search engine opens with a huge textbox that prompts the user, “What are you looking for?” However, rather than giving a simple list of links, SearchGPT attempts to organize and make sense of them. In one example from OpenAI, the search engine summarizes its discoveries on music festivals before providing summaries of the events, followed by an attribution link.

The Google and Perplexity rival will be released as a prototype in limited quantities, with plans to integrate it into ChatGPT eventually.

Another example it explains when to plant tomatoes before delving into different plant types. After displaying the results, you can ask follow-up questions or click the sidebar to access further relevant resources. There is also a function known as “visual answers,” but OpenAI did not respond to The Verge before publishing to explain how it works.

How does the SearchGPT work?

SearchGPT is driven by the GPT-4 family of models and will only be available to 10,000 test users at launch, according to OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood. The business is working with third-party partners and direct content feeds to build its search results.

For the time being, SearchGPT is only a “prototype”. According to OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood.

According to Wood, OpenAI collaborates with third-party companies and builds search results utilizing direct content feeds. The ultimate goal is to integrate the search functionality directly into ChatGPT.

It represents the beginning of what might become a significant threat to Google, which has pushed to include AI elements into its search engine, fearful that customers will flock to other firms that provide the tools first. It also puts OpenAI in direct competition with Perplexity, a firm that calls itself an AI “answer” engine.

Perplexity has lately come under fire for an AI summaries tool that authors complained was copying their work.

OpenAI’s New Approach for SearchGPT Collaboration

OpenAI seems to have taken note of the concerns and has announced a significant shift in strategy. In a blog post, the business stated that SearchGPT was created in partnership with several news partners, including the proprietors of The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company. “News partners gave valuable feedback, and we continue to seek their input,” says Wood.

Publishers will be able to “manage how they appear in OpenAI search features,” the company says. They can opt out of having their content used to train OpenAI’s models while still appearing in search results.

“SearchGPT is designed to help users connect with publishers by prominently citing and linking to them in searches,” according to OpenAI’s blog post.

“Responses have clear, in-line, named attribution and links so users know where information is coming from and can quickly engage with even more results in a sidebar with source links.”

Releasing its search engine as a prototype benefits OpenAI in a variety of ways. First, if SearchGPT’s results are significantly inaccurate, as when Google released AI Overviews and instructed us to put glue on our pizza, it’s easy to dismiss it as a prototype! There is also the possibility of incorrect attributions or wholesale plagiarism, as Perplexity was accused of.

OpenAI’s Strategic Moves with SearchGPT

This new product has been expressed about for months, with The Information reporting on its development in February and Bloomberg publishing more in May. We reported at the same time that OpenAI was aggressively attempting to poach Google staff for a search team. Some X users also observed a new website that OpenAI was working on, which hinted at the transfer.

OpenAI has gradually brought ChatGPT closer to the real-time web. When GPT-3.5 was launched, the AI model was already several months out of date. Last September, OpenAI published Explore with Bing, a mechanism for ChatGPT to explore the internet, but it looks to be far less sophisticated than SearchGPT.

OpenAI’s quick advancements have earned ChatGPT millions of customers, but the company’s costs are rising. According to The Information, OpenAI’s AI training and inference expenditures might approach $7 billion this year, with millions of users on the free version of ChatGPT adding to compute costs.

SearchGPT will be free during its first launch, and although the feature now appears to be ad-free, it’s evident that the firm will need to work out monetization soon.

Will SearchGPT be a threat to Google’s dominance?

It is only the beginning for SearchGPT, but Google has also hastened to implement AI components in its search engines. OpenAI might compete more directly with Perplexity, a startup that labels itself an AI “answer” engine.

SearchGPT FAQs: