The search engine can compete with Google.
OpenAI is launching a search engine based on ChatGPT that could affect the flow of Internet traffic looking for news, sports scores, and other relevant information.
The artificial intelligence (AI) company said on Thursday that it is releasing the search feature to paid ChatGPT users, but will eventually expand it to all ChatGPT users.
The company released a preview version in July for a small group of users and publishers.
The original version of ChatGPT, released in 2022, was trained on huge amounts of online text, but could not answer questions about current events that were not in its training data.
This feature could put OpenAI in direct competition with Google, which in May flipped its search engine, with AI-generated written summaries now often appearing at the top of search results.
These summaries are meant to quickly answer a user’s search query so that they don’t have to click on a link and visit another website for more information.
Google’s update came after a year of testing on a small group of users, but the use still led to false results, which indicates the risks associated with handing over information retrieval to AI chatbots, which are prone to errors known as hallucinations.
The intention of artificial intelligence companies to have their chatbots deliver news gathered by professional journalists has worried some news outlets.
The New York Times is one of several publications that have sued OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft for copyright infringement. Earlier in October, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post sued another artificial intelligence search engine, Perplexity, published by News Corp.
OpenAI said in a blog post on Thursday that its new search engine was created with the help of news partners, including The Associated Press and News Corp.
It will contain links to sources such as news and blog posts, the company said. It was not immediately clear whether the links would correspond to the original source of information provided by the chatbot.
