OpenAI revealed a prototype of its search engine SearchGPT, on Thursday. This new tool aims to provide users with quick and up-to-date answers backed by clear and relevant sources.
The company plans to add this feature now being tested by a small user group, to its ChatGPT chatbot in the future.
The launch might affect Google and its leading search engine. Ever since ChatGPT came out in November 2022, Alphabet investors have worried that OpenAI could grab a piece of Google’s search market. They’re concerned it might give people new ways to find information online.
Image: OpenAI
With this early version, OpenAI is seeing how well it can do just that. They’re telling users they can “search in a more natural easy-to-understand way” and ask follow-up questions “like you would in a normal conversation.”
“Search has room to get a lot better,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted Thursday on X.
Alphabet stock dropped over 3% on Thursday to end at $167.28, while the Nasdaq fell less than 1%.
In May, Google rolled out AI Overview to a small group of users. CEO Sundar Pichai said this was the most significant update to search in 25 years. This feature lets people see a quick answer to their questions right at the top of Google Search results.
Despite Google’s year-long effort on AI Overview, people started complaining after users spotted that searches gave nonsense or wrong answers within the AI feature — with no way to turn it off.
“Google has felt a bit nervous since this stuff first took off,” said Daniel Faggella, who started and leads research at Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research talking about AI that creates content. “We haven’t watched their company fall apart so far, but we have seen them stumble a bit.”
The SearchGPT announcement comes after OpenAI released a new AI model, “GPT-4o mini,” last Thursday. This new model branches off from GPT-4o, the company’s quickest and most capable model so far, which they introduced in May during a live event with company leaders.
OpenAI which Microsoft supports, has an estimated value of over $80 billion according to investors. The company started in 2015 and now faces pressure to maintain its lead in the generative AI market. At the same time, it needs to figure out how to turn a profit while spending huge amounts on processors and infrastructure to create and train its models.
Last Month, OpenAI announced they hired two top executives and formed a partnership with Apple. This partnership includes integrating ChatGPT with Siri. Sarah Friar joined as chief financial officer. She was CEO of Nextdoor and finance chief at Square before. Kevin Weil became chief product officer. He worked as president at Planet Labs and held senior roles at Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can read more about this here.
OpenAI is beefing up its executive team as its big language models become more crucial across the tech world and as rivals pop up in the growing generative AI field.
OpenAI’s new small AI model and the test version of SearchGPT are also part of the company’s efforts to lead in “multimodality,” or the ability to offer many kinds of AI-created content such as text, pictures, sound, video and search, in one tool: ChatGPT.
About SearchGPT, OpenAI’s blog post said the tool’s picture results will help users “understand better”.
In the previous year, OpenAI’s Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap shared with CNBC, “The world has multiple modes.” He went on to say that because people “interact with the world, we look at things, we listen to things, we talk about things,” so restricting interactions to just text doesn’t cut it.
