OpenAI just launched its AI search update for ChatGPT. Three months after the company’s initial announcement of a SearchGPT prototype, OpenAI’s vision for the future of AI search is now available to the public.
“We’re focused on making ChatGPT the best place to answer any question, including live information from the web,” says Adam Fry, search product lead at ChatGPT. Fry calls it “ChatGPT search” instead of “SearchGPT,” and it enters an increasingly crowded and contentious field of AI search options for users, with competition from smaller startups such as Perplexityas well as technological giants, such as Google with its AI Overview Search Results. So far in 2024, journalists have criticized Google and Perplexity’s AI search implementations for incorrectly copying aspects of the original work and creating false information.
In the lead-up to the ChatGPT search update, OpenAI reached content licensing agreements with multiple online publishers, including The Atlantic, Vox Media, and Condé Nast, WIRED’s parent company. These agreements allow the AI startup to use the work of publishers to train its systems in exchange for a fee. (Like the firewall between the editorial and advertising teams, commercial agreements have no bearing on WIRED’s coverage.)
I was quite anxious about the ramifications when I first saw my writing for WIRED that ChatGPT referenced in 2023. After a few hours of testing a pre-release version of ChatGPT’s new AI search, it’s clear to me that OpenAI has achieved a significant progress since its initial release. messy foray into web browsing, with more interactive elements and clearer attribution of its sources. I could see a subset of early adopters really latching onto ChatGPT’s new search.
With this in mind, the product needs improvements before it can truly compete with Google’s dominance in essential search experiences such as online shopping. ChatGPT also makes some of the same mistakes as other AI search tools, such as hallucinating and citing incorrect information. Curious to try the update for yourself? Here’s how to use it and some examples from my initial experiences.
How to use the ChatGPT search tool
To try this update right away, you need to pay for one of OpenAI’s subscriptions. If you have the ChatGPT Plus plan for $20 a month or ChatGPT Teams through work, the new search experience should be available. OpenAI will likely roll this out to users on Enterprise and Edu plans by the end of November. Free users will have to wait the longest, probably until early next year.
ChatGPT search is powered by a custom version of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s latest generative model. It is available to users through the ChatGPT websitemobile application (Android, Apple) and web application (Waterproof, windows). In any country where ChatGPT is available, the AI search feature will likely be an option.
