OpenAI integrates web search in ChatGPT

OpenAI can now provide answers to queries about real-time events like a search engine, the AI startup announced on October 31. Earlier, the generative AI chatbot’s knowledge base was limited to events until December 2023, limiting its ability significantly when it came to providing latest information to its users. 

OpenAI said its new search ability will also provide users with links to the original web sources, such as news articles or blog posts used by ChatGPT to generate their answers. 

This should enhance trust in the search responses and could also help the company mitigate the risks of potential lawsuits from news publications on the grounds of using their human-generated knowledge without giving them due credit. Open AI said it has partnered with news and data providers to furnish search information and will add new categories such as News, Sports, Stocks, Weather and Maps for quick access.

Perplexity AI, which offers generative AI powered search, was sued last month by The New York Post and Dow Jones, for massive amounts of illegal copying from their copyrighted work. Last month, New York Times also sent a cease and desist order to stop Perplexity from using its copyrighted content in AI generated search results and summaries.  

Further, OpenAI said that in addition to getting answers to search queries from ChatGPT, users can also search the web manually using ChatGPT’s new search button, in case they want to.

OpenAI added that the Search capability will start rolling out from October 31 to desktop and mobile users who have access to ChatGPT Plus, Team or who were part of Search GPT waitlist. It will be available to enterprise and Edu users in the next few weeks while free users will get it in coming months. 

Vox Media, Conde Nast, Associated Press, Financial Times, Hearst, Time, Reuters, The Atlantic and Axel Springer are some of the global news publications that have partnered with OpenAI to provide content for Search. 

The search model is based on OpenAI’s most advanced multi-modal language model GPT-4o.  Released in May, GPT-4o can process and generate text, images and audio. It is capable of reasoning, solving complex math problems and can generate AI generated voices with emotional nuances like humans. 

Having Search in its arsenal should enhance the appeal of ChatGPT and keep users glued to it for a longer time instead of switching to Google Search or other AI search apps such as Perplexity that have become immensely popular in the last few months. 

Though Google still dominates the search market with 89.3% market share, as per Statcounter, it has been forced to rethink its search strategy after the release of ChatGPT in October 2022. 

Google has integrated its private generative AI model Gemini into Search, allowing users to use more natural language queries and create more informative search results pages. 

In May, Google also rolled out a feature called AI Overview that could generate useful and informative summaries. However, the feature was rolled back within days after it started giving misleading and bizarre suggestions. 

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