OpenAI on Monday said it is making ChatGPT-powered Internet search available to all users, escalating its threat to Google’s dominance.
The San Francisco-based tech firm had beefed up its ChatGPT generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot with search engine capabilities in late October, but made the feature available only to paying subscribers.
The newly public feature enables users to receive “fast, timely answers” with links to relevant Web sources — information that previously required using a traditional search engine, the company said.
Photo: AFP
The upgrade to ChatGPT enables the AI chatbot to provide real-time information from across the Web.
“We’re bringing search to all logged-in free users of ChatGPT,” OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil said in a video posted on YouTube.
“That means it’ll be available globally on every platform where you use ChatGPT,” Weil said.
Examples of the new interface demonstrated by OpenAI resembled search results provided by Google and Google Maps, though without the clutter of advertising.
They also appeared similar to the interface of Perplexity, another AI-powered search engine that offers a more conversational version of Google by featuring the sources it referenced in the answer.
Rather than launching a separate product, OpenAI has integrated search directly into ChatGPT.
Users can enable the search feature by default or activate it manually via a Web search icon.
Since their launch, data on AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude have been limited by time cutoffs, so the answers they provided were not up-to-date.
In contrast, Google and Microsoft Corp both combine AI-generated answers with Web results.
The addition of online search to ChatGPT could raise more questions about the start-up’s link to Microsoft, a major OpenAI investor, which is also trying to expand the reach of its Bing search engine against Google.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has set his company on a path to becoming an Internet powerhouse.
He successfully catapulted the company to a staggering US$157 billion valuation in a recent round of fundraising that included Microsoft, Tokyo-based conglomerate Softbank Group Corp and AI chipmaker Nvidia Corp as investors.
Enticing new users with search engine capabilities would increase the company’s computing needs and costs, which are enormous.
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