OpenAI has announced a prototype of its latest AI-powered search engine SearchGPT.
SearchGPT’s goal is to supply “fast, timely answers with clear and relevant sources” to rework the way in which we interact with information online.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, expressed his confidence in the brand new product, stating on X: “We imagine that search can get significantly better than it’s today.”
The company plans to eventually integrate SearchGPTwhich is currently being tested with a small group of users, into its ChatGPT itself.
ChatGPT already has Bing integration, but SearchGPT combines generative AI with the real-time search index for an overall more complex AI-driven search result.
In OpenAIs wordsSearchGPT guarantees users to “search in a more natural, intuitive way” and ask follow-up questions “identical to you’ll in a conversation.”
We imagine that the search can still be significantly improved.
We are launching a brand new prototype called SearchGPT: https://t.co/A28Y03X1So
We will learn from the prototype, improve it, after which integrate the technology into ChatGPT to make use of it in real time and with maximum profit.
– Sam Altman (@sama) July 25, 2024
Perplexity AI already performs AI searches, but was recently embroiled in controversy for harvesting data from web sites without permission.
Another interesting point is that approx. 15% of leading web sites are already blocking OpenAI's web crawlers and the pool of knowledge available to AI browsers could also be limited, potentially affecting the standard of AI-generated search results.
Therefore, SearchGPT cannot guarantee access to the web sites it needs to supply the best quality information.
It will likely be interesting to see how OpenAI plans to get around this.
We know the corporate is working hard to determine partnerships with news organizations that can help provide AI search with up-to-date information without the foundations, like Perplexity did.
Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corp, was quite poetic on the topic: “Sam and the truly talented team at OpenAI understand instinctively that AI-powered search is simply effective when it is predicated on the best quality, most reliable information from trusted sources. For the dominion of heaven to be in balance, the connection between technology and content should be symbiotic and provenance protected.”
Google suffers a blow
Even in its prototype form, SearchGPT had an impact on Google: Alphabet shares fell greater than 3% on Thursday to shut at $167.28, while the broader Nasdaq index fell lower than 1%.
The announcement follows Google's foray into AI-powered search. In May, Google introduced AI Overview, which CEO Sundar Pichai called probably the most notable expansion of search in the corporate's 25-year history.
However, SGE soon faced criticism after users noticed that queries inside the AI function sometimes returned nonsensical or inaccurate results without the user with the ability to opt out.
OpenAI tries to remain in people’s minds
The announcement of SearchGPT is a component of a broader initiative by OpenAI to remain on the forefront of the generative AI market.
Last week, the corporate launched a brand new AI model called “GPT-4o mini,” a spin-off of its fastest and strongest model thus far, GPT-4o.
As a part of its technique to strengthen its position, OpenAI recently announced the hiring of two top executives: Sarah Friar, previously CEO of Nextdoor and CFO at Square, joined as Chief Financial Officer and Kevin Weil, previously at Planet Labs, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, joined as Chief Product Officer.
Competition within the generative AI market is undoubtedly far more intense than it was when ChatGPT modified the industry in late 2022.
While ChatGPT continues to be probably the most widely used chatbot tool, advances by the open source brigade of Meta (who recently released Llama 3.1, the world's largest open weight model), Mistral, and a number of other others are making it harder to monetize closed source projects.
SearchGPT is OpenAI's latest try and stay ahead.
After the delays in the discharge of GPT-4o's much-hyped speech synthesis features, many are wondering when SearchGPT will actually be released.
