OpenAI on Thursday beefed up its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot with search engine capabilities, as the startup takes on Google's decades-long dominance of finding answers on the web.
With the update, "you can get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for," OpenAI said in a blog post.
The significant upgrade to ChatGPT enables the AI chatbot to provide real-time information with direct links to source material on topics ranging from weather forecasts and stock prices to sports scores and breaking news, the company said.
Examples shown on the OpenAI website closely resembled search results on Google and Google Maps.
It also resembled the interface of Perplexity, another AI-powered search engine that offers a more conversational version of Google with sources referenced in the answer.
The new feature is an update to ChatGPT with users given the option to either get the results by default or manually choose the capability by clicking the web search icon.
The company added that any website or publisher can opt to appear in ChatGPT's search results, with OpenAI actively seeking feedback from content creators to refine the system further.
Since their launch, AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude have been limited with cutoffs in time in which the answers provided were no longer up to date.
This has been widely interpreted as a weakness of AI chatbots, especially at OpenAI, which does not have a stand-alone search engine providing more timely data, in contrast to Google or Microsoft which combine AI answers with web results.
The launch will raise more questions about the startup's link to Microsoft, a major OpenAI investor, which is also trying to expand the reach of its search engine against Google with its Copilot AI.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said he wants to grow his company into an internet behemoth.
He successfully catapulted the company to a staggering $157 billion valuation in a recent round of fundraising that included Microsoft, Tokyo-based conglomerate SoftBank and AI chip maker Nvidia as investors.
Enticing new users with search engine capabilities will only increase the company's enormous computing needs and costs, which are enormous.