OpenAI wants to make ChatGPT the new place you turn when you want to Google something.
What happened: OpenAI launched its long-rumoured version of AI-powered search. Integrated into ChatGPT, the chatbot will detect when a question requires info from the web and pull up-to-date info like news stories, stock prices, maps, and more — instead of only using data it was trained on.
- It uses “a mix of search technologies,” including Microsoft’s Bing, as well as a fine-tuned version of the company’s GPT-4o model.
- It is available now for paid Plus and Team subscribers, with enterprise and educational customers getting access within weeks and free users getting it in the coming months.
Why it matters: Search is a hotly contested part of the AI industry and — on top of startups like OpenAI and Perplexity becoming competitors to Google and Bing — this could be a battle of which business model wins: using it as a feature to entice paid and free users to ChatGPT, or turning it into another place to serve ads, which Google recently added to its AI Overviews.
In Canada: Google began rolling its AI-powered search features out in Canada earlier this week, though it still has some kinks to work out. A search about symbolism on the cover of The Beatles’ Abbey Road returns results about various symbols of funeral processions — including George Harrison wearing denim, a “colour of mourning in Canada.”
Zoom out: A number of publishers and website owners have expressed concerns about what AI search could do to their web traffic — if all the info a user needs is in the search results, they have no reason to click through to a website, potentially hurting their revenue.
Yes, but: Google claims prominently featuring sources in AI Overviews has actually increased traffic to websites. OpenAI has also been pursuing licensing deals with news outlets to pay for their content, though that doesn’t help smaller outlets or non-news websites that can’t access those kinds of deals.