OpenAI has announced the launch of SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine with real-time access to information across the internet.
The search engine starts with a large textbox that asks the user “What are you looking for?” But rather than returning a plain list of links, SearchGPT tries to organize and make sense of them.
SearchGPT is just a “prototype” for now. The GPT-4 family of models powers the service and for now, will only be accessible to 10,000 test users at launch
It’s the start of what could become a meaningful threat to Google, which has rushed to bake in AI features across its search engine, fearing that users will flock to competing products that offer the tools first. It also puts OpenAI in more direct competition with the startup Perplexity, which bills itself as an AI “answer” engine. Perplexity has recently been criticised for an AI summaries feature that publishers claimed was directly ripping off their work.
Publishers will have a way to “manage how they appear in OpenAI search features,” the company writes. They can opt out of having their content used to train OpenAI’s models and still be surfaced in search.
“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 helps OpenAI in a few different ways. First, if SearchGPT’s results are wildly incorrect — like when Google rolled out AI Overviews and told us to put glue on our pizza — it’s easier to say, well, it’s a prototype! There’s also potential for getting attributions wrong or maybe wholesale ripping off articles like Perplexity was accused of doing.
The rapid advancements by OpenAI have won ChatGPT millions of users, but the company’s costs are adding up. The Information reported this week that OpenAI’s AI training and inference costs could reach $7 billion this year, with the millions of users on the free version of ChatGPT only further driving up compute costs. SearchGPT will be free during its initial launch, and since the feature appears to have no ads right now, it’s clear the company will have to figure out monetization soon.
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