OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search Now Available to Everyone, Targets Google
OpenAI now provides ChatGPT-powered internet searches to all users, broadening its search engine features beyond paid subscribers and posing a more serious threat to Google’s dominance.
OpenAI announced on Monday that ChatGPT-powered internet searches will be available to all users. This makes OpenAI an even bigger threat to Google’s dominance. The tech company in San Francisco added search engine features to its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot at the end of October, but only paid subscribers could use them.
The company said that the new public feature lets users get “fast, timely answers” with links to relevant web sources. Before, users had to use a traditional search engine to get this kind of information. With the update to ChatGPT, the AI chatbot can give you information from all over the web in real-time.
In a YouTube video, OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil said, “We’re adding search to ChatGPT for all free users who are logged in.” “That means you can get it on all ChatGPT platforms worldwide.” As an example, OpenAI showed off parts of the new interface that looked like the results from Google Search and Google Maps, but without all the ads.
They also resembled the interface of Perplexity, another AI-powered search engine that displays the sources used in its answers to create a more conversational experience than Google. In the video, Adam Fry, who leads the product for ChatGPT Search, said, “We’re just making the ChatGPT experience that you know better with up-to-date information from the web.”
“We are currently distributing this to hundreds of millions of users.” OpenAI has built search right into ChatGPT instead of releasing a separate product. Users can manually activate the search feature or use a web search icon.
AI Chatbots Faced Data Limits
Since their first release, AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude have had limited data because of time limits. This means that their answers are not up to date. Conversely, both Google and Microsoft utilize web results and AI-generated answers.
When ChatGPT incorporates online search, it will raise questions about the startup’s relationship with Microsoft, a company that has invested heavily in OpenAI and is actively promoting its Bing search engine to rival Google. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has put his company on track to become a major player on the internet.
In a recent round of fundraising, which included investors from Microsoft, the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, and the AI chipmaker Nvidia, he was able to raise the company’s value to an amazing $157 billion. Adding search engine features to attract new users will make the company’s huge computing needs and costs go up.
