OpenAI has announced a set of new search features for its popular chatbot ChatGPT, the likes of which seem intentionally designed to make the app more competitive with Google and other search engines.
In a blog post published Thursday, OpenAI announced the new features, which will allow users to search for “timely” information. The answers generated by ChatGPT will come with links to “relevant web sources,” the company announced. Those links can be found by clicking a “Sources” button beneath the auto-generated answers, which will open a sidebar with the relevant webpages. A prototype of the search features, dubbed SearchGPT, went live in July.
“ChatGPT can now search the web in a much better way than before. You can get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for,” the company announced in its blog. “This blends the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more.”
OpenAI also announced Friday that it had partnered with “news and data providers” to give users “up-to-date information and new visual designs for categories like weather, stocks, sports, news, and maps.” Organizations listed as partners in OpenAI’s work include the Associated Press, Axel Springer, Condé Nast, Dotdash Meredith, Financial Times, GEDI, Hearst, Le Monde, News Corp, Prisa (El País), Reuters, The Atlantic, Time, and Vox Media.
Media partnerships with OpenAI have been controversial, given the potential market competition its products pose to news organizations. The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, and has accused the company of using its material illegally.
OpenAI’s move here is amusing. The obvious implication is that its trying to make ChatGPT more like Google. However, Google has also been trying to make its search engine more like ChatGPT. Earlier this year, the tech giant rolled out AI-generated answers to Search queries as part of its pivot towards broader AI integration. The rollout was rocky (the answers were often wrong, and are still often wrong), but the AI commentaries have stuck around. OpenAI’s ChatGPT feature, coming a full five months after Google’s “Answers” feature, looks derivative, and doesn’t appear to offer anything that Google isn’t already offering. OpenAI claims the number of users for its app is going up, though it’s a hanging question whether web users will ever defect from Google in droves the way Sam Altman hopes.
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