Artificial intelligence company OpenAI looks to have taken a step into the world of search engines with a new product that might challenge giants like Google and Bing.
This was confirmed on Thursday this week when the company announced SearchGPT, a new search feature built to give real-time answers to enquiries by users, drawing from web sources.
From the get-go, SearchGPT looks quite similar to ChatGPT’s general interface. All one has to do is type in a question and SearchGPT instantly gives you answers based on information and photos obtained from the web. Unlike the engines like Google though, you can get to immediately key in follow-up questions.
The search engine is powered by OpenAI models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and GPT-4o) and is currently still in early stages of testing as the company still refers to it as a ‘prototype’. The firm states that it plans to integrate some of its into ChatGPT in the future.
“Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results,” OpenAI writes in a blog post. “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.”
A search engine by OpenAI has been speculated for a while now as more users for a product that fully integrates AI when it comes to real-time information search.
Google has obviously dabbled in AI-powered search with AI Overviews but it has faced alot of fire through accusations of plagiarism and inaccuracies. According to a study, AI Overviews was found to de-emphasise heavily on article links therefore negatively reducing publisher traffic by about 25%.
So, alot of users and experts will be eager to see how SearchGPT tries to correct this as OpenAI is currently the giant when it comes to AI development.
OpenAI states that the engine prominently cites and links to publishers in searches with clear, in-line named attribution. The company adds that it is working with publishers to build a way for website owners to monitor how their content appears in search results.
However, this all comes at a time when AI developers are facing lots of criticism for illegally obtaining content from creators particularly on YouTube to train models. So, it will be interesting to see whether the firm will live up to its word.
