OpenAI has made its much-anticipated entry into the search engine market with the introduction of SearchGPT. This new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search engine provides real-time access to information on the internet and reimagines the search experience for users. However, not everyone can benefit from this search engine at the moment. When you go to the search engine page, you may see a waiting list sign-up button.
SearchGPT starts with a large text box asking the user, “What are you looking for?” But unlike traditional search engines, it organizes and makes sense of the search results rather than just providing a list of links. In one example from OpenAI, SearchGPT summarizes its findings about music festivals and then provides brief descriptions of the events, along with links to the source.
In another example, it details different tomato varieties while explaining tomato planting times. Once the results appear, users can ask follow-up questions or open other related links from the sidebar. There’s also a feature called “visual answers,” which OpenAI hasn’t yet detailed.
For example, when you search for “music festivals in Boone, North Carolina in August 2024” on SearchGPT, the model will provide real-time information gathered from the internet, along with links to the source. The service will only be available to 10,000 testers for now. OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood said SearchGPT is powered by the GPT-4 family of models, and they work with third-party partners and create search results using direct content feeds.
Features and operation of SearchGPT
SearchGPT, which has the potential to be a direct competitor to major search engines like Google, is the result of OpenAI’s efforts to integrate AI features into its search engine. Google is quick to respond to such innovations by adding AI features to its own search engine. This also puts OpenAI in direct competition with AI “answer” engines like Perplexity.
SearchGPT’s “visual answers” feature shows OpenAI’s Sora AI-powered video on YouTube. It also features a series of individual images of penguins and their families, with a company stock screenshot above and a cloud-covered sun next to it.
OpenAI says it is responsive to feedback, emphasizing that it collaborated with news partners in the development of SearchGPT. According to the company’s blog post, organizations like The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and Vox Media provided valuable feedback during the development process.
Publishers can choose not to have their content used to train OpenAI’s models, but they can still appear in search results. Search results include clear, inline, and named citations and links to help users understand the source of the information.
SearchGPT’s availability as a prototype allows OpenAI to more easily manage issues with false results or attribution. The company’s new product has been talked about for months, and several reports have provided insights into its development process. OpenAI is taking steps to make ChatGPT more compatible with the real-time web. With the release of GPT-3.5, the AI model was outdated. However, last September, a specification was released for ChatGPT to be able to crawl the web, but it was not as advanced as SearchGPT.
OpenAI continues to advance rapidly with ChatGPT reaching millions of users, but the costs of this progress are also increasing. According to the information, OpenAI’s AI training and inference costs could reach $7 billion this year. SearchGPT will initially be free, but with no ads, it seems the company will soon need to find ways to make money.