OpenAI on Thursday enhanced its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot with search engine capabilities. Now the startup is challenging Google on web search. The company said that the upgrade enables users to get timely answers with links to web sources. Which previously required using a search engine. This important upgrade in ChatGPT enables the AI chatbot to provide information in real time.
What will be special in this?
Instead of launching a separate product, OpenAI has integrated search directly into ChatGPT for paying customers, although it will be extended to users using the free version of the chatbot. Users can activate the search feature by default or activate it manually. The company said that any website or publisher can opt-in to appear in ChatGPT’s search results. OpenAI is actively seeking feedback from content creators to further refine the system.
The Favorites feature
has been limited by data outages on AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Cloudera since its launch, so answers provided were not up-to-date.
This has been seen as a weakness for AI chatbots, especially OpenAI, which doesn’t have a stand-alone search engine that provides much data. In contrast, both Google and Microsoft combine AI answers with web results. For now, this feature will not include ads, allowing ChatGPT to provide much cleaner results than Google.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) on Thursday that search is his “favorite feature we’ve launched on ChatGPT since the bot’s debut in 2022.” Altman added on Reddit that “I find it’s a faster and easier way to get the information I need.”
The launch will raise more questions about the startup’s links with Microsoft, which is also trying to expand the reach of its Bing search engine against Google. Altman has positioned his company to become an Internet powerhouse.