Whip Bull reported that on July 26, there was heavy news in the field of artificial intelligence, OpenAI's artificial intelligence search officially began testing, directly challenging Google.
OpenAI is letting a limited user base test a new set of search features that will answer questions with more timely information and prominent source links, its most direct challenge to Alphabet Inc.'s Google to date.
The new option, called SearchGPT, will be released as a prototype on web browsers and will provide users with a standalone search experience that may later be added to its most famous product, ChatGPT.
OpenAI says users will see responses to their queries with embedded attribution of creators and news publishers, including a growing number of media companies that have reached licensing agreements with the startup in recent months.
SearchGPT will also allow users to ask follow-up questions without losing the context of the original query.
OpenAI declined to disclose the timeline for SearchGPT's rollout, but said it would initially be available to users who signed up for the waitlist.
OpenAI says it is working with creator and publisher partners to get feedback on the new tool and plans to integrate the most successful search features into ChatGPT.
Bloomberg previously reported that OpenAI is preparing a search product.
With the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, OpenAI has sparked a race to infuse generative AI into a range of core internet services.
Google and OpenAI backer Microsoft Corp overhauled its search offerings, adding more conversational AI capabilities, while startup Perplexity launched a search-oriented AI app. Now, OpenAI is advancing its own vision of AI search.
OpenAI said it eventually plans to integrate the tool, which is currently being tested with a small group of users, into its viral chatbot, ChatGPT.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, Alphabet's investors have been concerned that OpenAI may be stealing Google's search market share by providing consumers with new ways to search for information online.
With this prototype, OpenAI is testing the waters.
Google shares fell about 2.5% after the news, while the Nasdaq rose slightly.
In May, Google launched AI Overview to select audiences, and CEO Sundar Pichai called it the biggest change in 25 years in search, with users able to see a summary of the answers to their queries at the very top of Google searches.
Although Google has been working on AI Overview for more than a year, public criticism has grown when users quickly notice that queries in the AI feature are returning meaningless or inaccurate results (and there is no way to opt out).
The SearchGPT announcement comes after OpenAI launched its new AI model, GPT-4o mini, last Thursday. The new model is an offshoot of GPT-4o, the startup's fastest and most powerful model to date, which was launched in May during a live event with executives.
OpenAI is backed by Microsoft, and investors have valued it at more than $80 billion.
Founded in 2015, the company is under pressure to remain a market leader in generative AI, while it is also spending heavily on processors and infrastructure to build and train its models in search of ways to make money.
Last month, OpenAI announced the hiring of two executives and a partnership with Apple, including the ChatGPT-Siri integration.
前 Nextdoor 首席执行官兼 Square 财务主管 Sarah Friar 加入担任首席财务官,前 Planet Labs总裁、前 Twitter 高级副总裁和 Facebook 和 Instagram 副总裁 Kevin Weil 加入担任首席产品官。
OpenAI is strengthening its executive team as large language models grow in importance across the tech landscape and the emerging generative AI market is rapidly becoming more competitive.
OpenAI's new mini-AI model and SearchGPT's prototype are both part of the company's efforts to be at the forefront of multimodality, or the ability to deliver multiple types of AI-generated media such as text, images, audio, video, and search in one tool: ChatGPT.
Last year, Brad Lightcap, OpenAI·'s chief operating officer, said: "The world is multimodal. If you think about the way we humans deal with and interact with the world, we see things, we hear things, we talk about things – the world is much bigger than the text. So it always feels incomplete for us to show how powerful and powerful these models are with text and code as a single modality, as a single interface.
The integration of generative AI into search engines has become an arms race between tech companies, even though AI has a track record of producing inaccurate results and raising copyright issues.
OpenAI said in a blog post that finding answers online takes a lot of effort and often requires multiple attempts to get relevant results.
The article praises a new way of searching, and we believe it will be faster and easier to find what you're looking for by augmenting our model's conversational capabilities with real-time information from across the web.
SearchGPT's Visual Answer feature showcases AI videos generated by OpenAI's Sora via YouTube. Image: OpenAI
Based on how SearchGPT presents and cites its sources of information, it is likely to exacerbate publishers' opposition to OpenAI's way of using its content.
In recent months, several news outlets and media organizations, including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Intercept, and several local newspapers, have filed legal proceedings against the company for alleged copyright infringement.
They argue that OpenAI is actually plagiarizing their work by illegally using their published work to train its AI models without consent or remuneration, profiting from protected material.
OpenAI has denied that its use of copyrighted data in training products like ChatGPT is illegal, instead arguing that its services create something new and fall under the "fair use" doctrine.
Other companies' attempts to foray into AI-powered search have also sparked backlash from users and publishers. Google recently launched its own AI-powered search feature called AI Overviews, which aggregates content in search results without requiring users to click through to other websites.
Despite Google's announcement of the feature's success during this week's earnings call, its launch has been criticized by publishers and creators who fear that AI Overviews will eat into their site's traffic and ad revenue.
Perplexity, another well-known AI search engine, can generate almost identical results to the text of a news article from which it is the source. Multiple publishers have issued legal threats to Perplexity, demanding that the search engine stop using its content in search results.
OpenAI says it is working with SearchGPT's publishers and providing them with options on how their content appears in its search results and seeks to ensure it promotes trusted sources.
The company's press release included statements from the CEO of The Atlantic Monthly and the CEO of News Corp., both of whom reportedly struck lucrative content deals with OpenAI and praised AI search as the future of the internet.
OpenAI could have a significant impact on the online search industry at a time when Google is facing the verdict in a landmark antitrust lawsuit filed by the United States Department of Justice.
The lawsuit accuses the tech giant of illegally monopolizing the internet search industry by striking multibillion-dollar deals with companies like Apple and Samsung to make Google the default browser on its devices.
OpenAI's blog post says: SearchGPT aims to help users connect with publishers by prominently citing and linking to publishers in searches. Responses have clear, inline, named attributions and links, so users know where the information is coming from and can quickly get more results in a sidebar with a link to the source.
Publishing its search engine as a prototype has helped OpenAI in several ways.
First of all, if SearchGPT's results are completely incorrect (like when Google rolls out an AI overview and tells us to apply glue on pizza), then it's easier to say, well, this is a prototype! There can also be attribution errors or, as Perplexity has been accused of, plagiarizing articles across the board.
People have been talking quietly about the new product for months, with The Information reporting on its development in February and Bloomberg reporting more in May. OpenAI has been aggressively poaching Google employees to join the search team. Some X users have also noticed that a new website being developed by OpenAI hints at the move.
OpenAI has been slowly bringing ChatGPT closer together with the real-time web. By the time GPT-3.5 was released, the AI model had been outdated for months. Last September, OpenAI released ChatGPT as a way to browse the internet called Browse with Bing, but it looks more rudimentary than SearchGPT.
OpenAI's rapid growth has earned ChatGPT millions of users, but the company's costs are also increasing.
The Information reported this week that OpenAI's AI training and inference costs could reach $7 billion this year, and that the millions of users of the free version of ChatGPT will only drive up the cost of computation even further. SearchGPT will be free when it first launches, and since the feature seems to be ad-free at the moment, it's clear that the company must find a way to make money as soon as possible.
OpenAI has now opened a waitlist for SearchGPT, and selected users will be notified via email.