OpenAI has announced that it is launching its artificial intelligence (AI) engine to challenge the market-dominating Google search engine.
The startup behind ChatGPT announced that it is testing a prototype of "SearchGPT," which is "designed to combine the power of our artificial intelligence models with information from the web" to quickly respond to online queries and provide relevant sources.
SearchGPT is currently being released to a small group of users and publishers to get feedback.
According to the San Francisco-based company, the search features refined in the prototype will be built into ChatGPT in the future.
Users will be able to interact with SearchGPT through conversational requests and will be able to ask additional questions as they would if they were talking to a human.
Google recently added AI-generated summaries of search results, called "views," to its search engine, sparking concerns among some users that the move will lead to fewer opportunities to show money-making ads.
This new feature offers written text at the top of Google search results, before traditional site links, that summarizes information that the engine thinks matches the user's query.
OpenAI's description of SearchGPT sounds similar to that of Google Overviews.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, companies in the sector have embarked on a frenzied race to deploy generative AI programs to create text, images and other content through prompts in everyday language.
"We're innovating at every level of the AI stack," Google chief Sundar Pichai said this week on parent company Alphabet's earnings call, which he also leads.
OpenAI said it is working with some publishers to refine SearchGPT, which is separate from training generative AI models.
"AI search will become one of the key ways people navigate the internet, and in these early days the technology must be built in a way that values, respects and protects journalism and publishers," said the chief executive director of The Atlantic Nicholas Thompson in a post on the OpenAI blog.
"We look forward to partnering with OpenAI in this process."
OpenAI invited users to sign up for a waiting list to try out SearchGPT. | BGNES
