OpenAI may be planning to enter the search industry, potentially challenging not only startups like Perplexity but also Google and Bing.
The company on Thursday announced “SearchGPT,” a search feature that pulls information from web sources to provide “timely answers” to questions.
UI-wise, SearchGPT isn't all that different from OpenAI's chatbot platform ChatGPT: You enter a query, and SearchGPT provides information and links to relevant sources from the web, at which point you can ask follow-up questions or explore additional related searches in the sidebar.
Powered by the OpenAI model, SearchGPT (which OpenAI describes as a prototype) is being released today to a “small group” of users and publishers (the waitlist is here), and OpenAI says it plans to integrate some of SearchGPT's features into ChatGPT in the future.
“Finding answers on the web can take a lot of effort and often requires multiple tries to get relevant results,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “By enhancing our models' conversational capabilities with real-time information from the web, we believe it will make it faster and easier for you to find what you're looking for.”
Image credit: SearchGPT
OpenAI's interest in building a Google-killer has been rumored for some time — The Information reported in February that a product, or at least a pilot, was in the works — but SearchGPT's release comes at a bad time, as AI-powered search tools have come under justified criticism for plagiarism, inaccuracy and content cannibalization.
Google's AI-powered search, AI Overviews, infamously suggested putting glue on pizza; Browser Company Arc Search told a reporter that severed toes can regrow; AI search engine Genspark once quickly recommended weapons that could be used to kill someone; and Perplexity plagiarized news articles written by other outlets, including CNBC, Bloomberg, and Forbes, without crediting or citing the source.
AI-generated summaries threaten to cannibalize traffic to source sites. In fact, they already are: one study found that AI summaries could negatively impact roughly 25% of publishers' traffic because they de-emphasize article links.
OpenAI has taken inspiration from Perplexity's ongoing apology tour to position SearchGPT as a more responsible, careful deployment.
OpenAI says SearchGPT “prominently cites and links” to publishers in search with “clear in-line named attribution,” and that the company is also working with publishers to design experiences that give website owners control over how their content appears in search results.
“It's important to note that SearchGPT is about search and is separate from the training of OpenAI's generative AI foundational models. If you opt out of generative AI training, your site may still appear in search results,” OpenAI clarified in a blog post. “We are committed to a vibrant ecosystem of publishers and creators.”
It's a bit hard to take a company at its word when it once harvested millions of YouTube transcripts without permission to train models on them, but we'll be watching to see how the SearchGPT saga unfolds.