OpenAI is testing a new search engine that uses generative artificial intelligence to produce results, raising the prospect of a significant challenge to Google’s dominance of the online search market.
SearchGPT will launch with a small group of users and publishers before a possible broader rollout, the company announced Thursday. OpenAI ultimately intends to incorporate search features into ChatGPT, rather than offering a standalone product.
OpenAI said SearchGPT is a temporary prototype that will combine the company’s AI models, such as ChatGPT, with the ability to perform internet searches. It will respond to queries in a conversational manner, while providing up-to-date information with “clear links to relevant sources.”
The search feature positions the company as a direct competitor to major search engines, especially Google, but also Bing, a product of OpenAI’s largest investor, Microsoft.
The integration of generative AI into search engines has become a Something like an arms race among tech companies, even though AI has a history of producing inaccurate results and raising copyright issues.
“Getting answers on the web can be very laborious, and it often takes multiple attempts to get relevant results,” OpenAI said in a blog post praising “a new way” of searching. “We believe that by enhancing the conversational capabilities of our models with real-time information from the web, finding what you’re looking for can be faster and easier.”
Depending on how SearchGPT presents and cites the sources of its information, it risks intensifying publisher pushback over how OpenAI uses their content.
In recent months, several media outlets and news organizations, including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Intercept, and a number of local newspapers, have taken legal action against the company for alleged copyright violations. They argue that OpenAI illegally trained its AI models on their published work without consent or compensation, profiting from copyrighted material and, in effect, plagiarizing their work.
OpenAI has rejected the claim that its use of copyrighted data in training products like ChatGPT was illegal, arguing instead that its services create something new and fall under the “fair use” doctrine.
Forays into AI-generated search by other companies have also sparked backlash from users and publishers. Google recently launched its own AI-enabled search feature, called AI Overviews, which summarizes the content of search results without requiring users to click through to other websites.
While Google touted the feature’s success on an earnings call this week, its launch was met with criticism from publishers and creators concerned that AI overviews would take away traffic and advertising revenue from their sites.
Another highlight AI-powered search enginePerplexity can produce results almost identical to the text of the news articles it uses as sources. Several editors have Sent Perplexity legal threats and demanded that the search engine stop using its content in its results.
OpenAI said it was partnering with publishers for SearchGPT and offering them choices about how their content appears within its results, as well as seeking to ensure it promotes trustworthy sources.
The company’s press release included statements from Atlantic’s CEO and News Corp’s CEO, both It is said to have reached lucrative content deals with OpenAIpraising AI-powered search as the future of the Internet.
OpenAI’s potential shakeup of the online search industry comes as Google faces an impending court decision in a landmark antitrust lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. The suit alleges that the tech giant illegally monopolized the internet search industry through multibillion-dollar deals with companies like Apple and Samsung to make it the default browser on their devices.
