After months of speculation about its search ambitions, OpenAI has unveiled SearchGPT, a “prototype” search engine that could finally help the company steal a piece of Google’s lucrative business.
OpenAI said the new tool will help users find what they’re looking for faster and easier by using generative AI to collect links and answer users’ questions in a conversational format. SearchGPT may eventually be integrated into OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT. In addition to broader web searches, the search engine will also leverage information provided by publishers who have signed agreements to give OpenAI access to their data.
OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood declined to demo SearchGPT or make it available for an interview with WIRED, but acknowledged that the company has already given access to unnamed partners and publishers and has used their feedback to improve various aspects of the search engine.
Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, was one of the first companies to publicly launch a generative AI search engine, releasing an AI-powered version of Bing that leveraged OpenAI’s large-scale language models in 2023. Microsoft’s AI search experience has since been rebranded as Copilot.
Since then, several competitors, including Google and Perplexity, have launched their own AI search experiences for users: Google’s AI Overviews provides AI-generated summaries of articles that often appear at the top of news search results, while OpenAI’s SearchGPT appears similar to Perplexity’s approach, with a chatbot providing a list of related links and allowing users to ask follow-up questions.
After OpenAI first introduced ChatGPT in November 2022, early users envisioned that the chatbot’s ability to mine and summarize information from the web could replace traditional web search. But the shortcomings of large language models make chatbots imperfect search tools: The models rely on training data that’s months or years old, and make up facts when they don’t know the answer.
Microsoft’s early efforts with Bing were far from successful, with the AI-powered search engine giving out odd, inappropriate and incorrect answers, and Bing’s market share only increased slightly even after an overhaul.
When Google added AI summaries to its search results in May this year, the company also quickly ran into trust issues, such as recommendations to add glue to pizza.OpenAI’s SearchGPT is the industry standard for AI search and may use an approach to generative AI called search augmentation generation, designed to reduce the rate of hallucinations in chatbot answers.In the RAG approach, the AI ​​tool references trusted information, such as preferred news websites, and links to the data’s original location when generating its output.
There’s also the possibility of copyright infringement. Perplexity in particular has been criticized by publications like WIRED for copying pieces of original journalism in its AI search tools and appearing to ignore requests from some websites not to pull content from them. In an OpenAI blog post, the company said of its efforts with publishers: “SearchGPT is designed to help users connect with publishers by citing and linking to them prominently in search.” Several companies, including Vox Media, The Atlantic, News Corp and The Financial Times, have signed licensing deals with OpenAI this year.