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OpenAI has been speculated about its search ambitions for months. Search GPTis a “prototype” search engine that could eventually help the company steal some of Google’s lucrative business.
OpenAI said the new tool will help users find what they’re looking for faster and easier by using generative AI to collect links and answer users’ questions in a conversational format. SearchGPT may eventually be integrated into OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT. In addition to broader web searches, the search engine will also leverage information provided by publishers who have signed agreements to give OpenAI access to their data.
OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood declined to demo SearchGPT or make it available for an interview with WIRED, but acknowledged that the company has already given access to unnamed partners and publishers and has used their feedback to improve various aspects of the search engine.
Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, was one of the first companies to publicly launch a generative AI search engine, releasing an AI-powered version of Bing that leveraged OpenAI’s large-scale language models in 2023. Microsoft’s AI search experience has since been rebranded as Copilot.
Since then, several competitors, including Google and Perplexity, have launched their own AI search experiences for users: Google’s AI Overviews provides AI-generated summaries of articles that often appear at the top of news search results, while OpenAI’s SearchGPT appears to be similar to Perplexity’s approach, with a chatbot providing a list of related links and allowing users to ask follow-up questions.
After OpenAI first introduced ChatGPT in November 2022, early users envisioned that the chatbot’s ability to mine and summarize information from the web could replace traditional web search. But the shortcomings of large language models make chatbots imperfect search tools: The models rely on training data that’s months or years old, and make up facts when they don’t know the answer.
Microsoft’s early efforts with Bing were far from successful, with the AI-powered search engine giving out odd, inappropriate and incorrect answers, and Bing’s market share only increased slightly even after an overhaul.
Google added AI summaries to its search results in May of this year, but quickly ran into several trust issues, including: Recommend adding glue to pizzaOpenAI’s SearchGPT is the industry standard for AI search and may use an approach to generative AI called Search Augmented Generation, designed to lower the rate of hallucinations in chatbot answers. In the RAG approach, the AI ​​tool references trusted sources, such as preferred news websites, and links back to the data’s original location when generating its output.
There’s also the possibility of copyright infringement. Perplexity in particular has been criticized by publications like WIRED for copying pieces of original journalism in its AI search tool and appearing to ignore requests not to grab content from some websites. In an OpenAI blog post, the company noted its commitment to publishers: “SearchGPT is designed to help users connect with publishers by citing and linking to them prominently in search.” Vox Media, Atlantic, News Corpand Financial Timesboth of which signed licensing agreements with OpenAI this year.