With the goal of providing users with “fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources,” OpenAI unveiled SearchGPT, a prototype of its search engine, on Thursday.
The tool is now being piloted with a select group of users, but the company has stated its intention to incorporate it into its ChatGPT chatbot Down the road.
As the market leader in search engines, Google may be affected by the rollout. Investors in Alphabet have been worried that OpenAI, since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022, could steal search market share from Google by providing users with alternative methods to look for information online.
In a post on X on Thursday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated, “We think there is room to make search much better than it is today.”
we think there is room to make search much better than it is today.
we are launching a new prototype called SearchGPT: https://t.co/A28Y03X1So
we will learn from the prototype, make it better, and then integrate the tech into ChatGPT to make it real-time and maximally helpful.
— Sam Altman (@sama) July 25, 2024
Launched to a select group of users in May, AI Overview—hailed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai as the most significant development in search in 25 years—provides a concise synopsis of search results displayed prominently at the top of Google Search.
The announcement of SearchGPT comes after OpenAI’s new artificial intelligence model, “GPT-4o mini,” was released last Thursday. Launched in May at a live-streamed event with executives, GPT-4o is the fastest and most powerful model to date. The new model is an offshoot of that model.
Publishers will be able to “manage their appearance in OpenAI search features,” according to the company’s statement. Users still have the option to have their content surfaced in search results even if they don’t want it used to train OpenAI’s models.
A partnership with Apple, which includes an integration of ChatGPT-Siri, and the hiring of two top executives were announced last month by OpenAI. Kevin Weil, a former president at Planet Labs, senior vice president at Twitter, and a vice president at Facebook and Instagram, as well as Sarah Friar, who was chief financial officer and finance chief at Square, respectively, were both hired.
While OpenAI’s lightning-fast progress has brought ChatGPT millions of users, the rising costs are eating into the company’s profit. With millions of users on the free version of ChatGPT further increasing compute costs, OpenAI’s AI training and inference costs could reach $7 billion this year, according to this week’s report in The Information. SearchGPT will initially be available for free, but the lack of advertisements suggests the company will soon need to find a way to make money off of it.
