(CNN) – OpenAI this Thursday announced its most direct threat yet to its staunch Big Tech rivals: a search engine that uses built-in artificial intelligence from the start.
The company is testing SearchGPT, which will combine its artificial intelligence technology with real-time information from the web to allow people to search for information the same way they talk with ChatGPT. While the search engine is currently in early testing for a limited number of users, OpenAI said it plans to integrate the tools into ChatGPT in the future.
With this new feature, OpenAI will compete directly with Google, which has dominated the online search market for years but has struggled to keep pace with the AI arms race that OpenAI started when it launched ChatGPT in November 2022. SearchGPT It could also pose a threat to Microsoft’s Bing, the second-tier search engine that last year incorporated OpenAI’s own technology in an effort to better compete with Google.
With SearchGPT, users will be able to ask questions in everyday language (the same way they speak with ChatGPT) and receive answers to which they can then ask additional questions. But unlike ChatGPT, which often relies on old data to generate its responses, SearchGPT will provide up-to-date information, with online links to what the company says are “clear and relevant sources.”
For example, a demo video shared by the company shows SearchGPT answering a query about the “best tomatoes to grow in Minnesota” with information on tomato varieties, as well as links to sites like “The Garden Magazine” and “The Gardening Dad.” ”.
The tool will also display a sidebar with additional links to relevant information, very similar to the ten blue links that users are used to seeing on Google search results pages.
“Getting answers on the web can require a lot of effort and often multiple attempts to get relevant results,” the company said in a statement. publication. “We believe that by enhancing the conversational capabilities of our models with real-time information from the web, finding what you are looking for can be faster and easier.”
The OpenAI search engine could cement generative AI (technology that can create original text as well as other types of media) as the future of online answer search, after Google and others experimented with early efforts to incorporate chatbots and answers. generated by AI in the search experience. But that future is not assured, given the tendency of AI tools to confidently assert false information without any indication that it may be incorrect or misleading.
OpenAI’s new tool comes after Google in May launched AI-generated summaries to top some search results pages, so users don’t have to click on multiple links to get quick answers to their questions. Google quickly stopped using the feature after it provided false information and, in some cases, totally absurdin response to queries from some users.
The launch of Google’s tool also raised concerns among some news publishers, who feared that AI summaries could cannibalize their web traffic by eliminating the need for users to visit their sites for information, and similar concerns could arise with the OpenAI search engine.
However, OpenAI said Thursday that it partnered with publishers to create the tool and give them options to “manage how they appear” in SearchGPT results. He added that sites can appear on SearchGPT even if they chose not to allow their content to be used to train the company’s artificial intelligence models.
