OpenAI’s ChatGPT search engine challenges Google and Microsoft, and further upends the web
Artificial intelligence pioneer OpenAI launched its own ChatGPT search engine on Thursday, positioning itself as a challenger to search titan Google and a direct competitor to the Bing search engine from its strategic partner Microsoft.
Integrated into the existing ChatGPT interface, it’s available starting today to paid users via ChatGPT Plus and Teams subscriptions, and people who signed up for a waitlist. OpenAI says it plans to make it available to free users in the months ahead.
The feature makes the popular AI chatbot more useful, on its own, for finding recent news and information that wouldn’t have been included in its core AI model in the past. OpenAI partnered with Microsoft Bing in the past for web search results.
Users can select a search icon in the ChatGPT dialogue box to explicitly conduct a web search. The results feel similar in some ways to those from AI startup Perplexity, with in-line citations linking to sources on the web.
That doesn’t mean it’s 100% accurate.
One of the first queries we made was about Microsoft’s revelations this week about OpenAI. As you can see below ChatGPT got most of the answer correct, although the actual number that Microsoft disclosed was $13 billion, because the Redmond company’s regulatory filing was effective prior to the company investing an additional $750 million as part of OpenAI’s latest funding round.
The Wall Street Journal article cited in the search results does accurately report a $14 billion investment, based on the latest available information, but our specific question was what Microsoft revealed, and in that way ChatGPT wasn’t on the mark. (Read our story for more details on what Microsoft actually said.)
It’s a minor nitpick, maybe, but a good illustration of AI’s fallibility.
Bigger picture, this could further reduce the need to actually visit websites, including those from news publications, further separating media sites and other web publishers from users, and jeopardizing the very sources of information that have been used to train ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence platforms.
OpenAI says in its announcement that it has “partnered with news and data providers to add up-to-date information and new visual designs for categories like weather, stocks, sports, news, and maps.”
And yes, as ChatGPT correctly noted in its response to our query, Microsoft’s latest 10K filing did, in fact, list OpenAI as a competitor (in addition to a partner) — and this latest release certainly bears that out. That said, the much bigger risk is to Google, given how much more it relies on search and advertising as a primary source of revenue.