OpenAI, the company that introduced us to ChatGPT recently announced SearchGPT, a new AI-powered search engine that might someday take on the likes of Google and Bing. The company says the new search features are "designed to combine the strength of our AI models with information from the web" to offer "fast and time answers with clear and relevant sources." Unlike traditional search engines like Google and Bing, which present users with links to web pages, SearchGPT directly answers your queries with links to the source and lets users even ask follow-up questions, with "shared context building with each query." OpenAI says SearchGPT tries to "help users connect with publishers by prominently citing and linking to them in searches" and that the AI-generated answers are also named attribution, so users know where the information is coming from. For example, if you search for music festivals, the search engine summarises the results and gives a short description of the event along with links from where it gathered the information. The company claims SearchGPT is "about search and is separate from training OpenAI's generative AI foundation models" and clarifies that sites that have opted out of generative AI training can also appear in search results. OpenAI says the SearchGPT prototype is temporary and will be eventually integrated with ChatGPT. powered by the GPT-4 family of models, the AI-powered search engine will initially be available to only 10,000 test users at launch. With Google stuffing AI Overviews in search to retain users before they turn to another search provider, OpenAI's SearchGPT might prove to be a real threat to Alphabet's dominance and AI-powered search engines like Perplexity, which recently came under fire after publishers said that it was copying their work even though they had explicitly stated that the content was not available for scraping.
