OpenAI is introducing a new feature that allows ChatGPT to work like a search engine, potentially putting it in direct competition with Google. This move could impact how internet users access news, sports scores, and other up-to-date information.
The San Francisco-based company announced on Thursday that it is launching a search feature for paid users of ChatGPT. Eventually, this feature will be available to all ChatGPT users. A preview version was released in July to a small group of users and publishers.
Previously, the original version of ChatGPT, released in 2022, was trained on large amounts of online text but couldn’t answer questions about recent events not included in its training data.
In May, Google revamped its search engine by adding AI-generated summaries at the top of search results. These summaries aim to quickly answer a user’s query without requiring them to click on a link to another website. However, this change came after a year of testing and still resulted in inaccuracies, highlighting the risks of relying on AI chatbots that can produce errors known as “hallucinations.”
The shift by AI companies to have their chatbots deliver news gathered by professional journalists has raised concerns among news organizations. The New York Times and other news outlets have sued OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft for copyright infringement. In October, News Corp, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, sued another AI search engine called Perplexity.
OpenAI stated in a blog post on Thursday that its new search feature was developed with assistance from news partners, including The Associated Press and News Corp. The feature will include links to sources such as news articles and blog posts. It is not immediately clear whether these links will correspond directly to the original sources of the information provided by the chatbot.
