OpenAI is looking to capture a piece of the world’s $120 billion search market with an AI-powered tool that directly competes with Google Search.
What happened: A test version of SearchGPT is expected to look and feel similar to ChatGPT, the company’s existing chatbot, in that it will try to organize and make sense of the information pulled from a search rather than just spitting back a list of links to navigate.
- A Bing integration in May 2023 has allowed ChatGPT users to browse the internet, but according to reporting by The Verge, SearchGPT feels more advanced.
- In the last year, OpenAI has been striking multimillion-dollar deals for content to train its technology with outlets like the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press.
Why it matters: This is the most meaningful threat ever to Google’s dominance in the search market, of which it controls more than 80%. OpenAI isn’t messing around and has been aggressively trying to poach Google employees to build its own search team.
Bottom line: OpenAI’s “release now, fix later” approach means SearchGPT will likely have some kinks to work out. And if there’s anything that choppy rollouts of AI-powered search tools have taught us so far: don’t trust results that tell you to bake your pizza with glue.—SB