A New Era of AI-Powered Search
Based in San Francisco, OpenAI revealed on Thursday that the search functionality is initially rolling out to paid ChatGPT users, with plans to expand it to all ChatGPT users in the future. The search engine has been in a preview phase since July, available to a limited group of users and publishers.
The original ChatGPT, released in 2022, was trained on a vast corpus of online text but was unable to provide answers related to the latest events due to the static nature of its training data. This new search engine is designed to address that limitation, integrating real-time data to enhance user experience.
Competing with Google’s AI Features
In May, Google updated its search engine to include AI-generated summaries at the top of search results, which aim to provide immediate answers to user queries without the need to click through to other websites. While this update followed a year of testing with a select group of users, challenges remain, including the potential for AI chatbots to produce misleading information, commonly referred to as hallucinations.
The shift by AI companies toward distributing news content collected by professional journalists has raised concerns among media organizations. Notably, The New York Times has joined several news outlets in suing OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft over copyright infringement. Other publishers, including News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, recently filed a lawsuit against another AI search engine, Perplexity.
Collaboration with News Partners
OpenAI stated in a blog post that its new search engine was developed with the assistance of news partners, including the Associated Press and News Corp. This collaboration is intended to incorporate links to news articles and blog posts, although it remains unclear whether these links will correspond directly to the sources of information provided by the chatbot.
The licensing and technology agreement between OpenAI and the Associated Press grants OpenAI access to a portion of AP’s text archive, potentially enriching the search engine’s offerings.
A Transformative Impact on Information Access
With this new venture, OpenAI is poised to transform how users seek and access information online, challenging the longstanding dominance of Google in the search engine market. As the rollout progresses, the implications for both users and content providers will be closely monitored.
