OpenAI to challenge Google with new search functionality

OpenAI on Thursday said it was putting its artificial intelligence engine to work in a challenge to Google's market-dominating search engine.

The startup behind ChatGPT announced that it is testing a "SearchGPT" prototype that is "designed to combine the strength of our AI models with information from the web" to answer online queries quickly and to provide relevant sources.

SearchGPT is being made available to a small group of users and publishers to get feedback, OpenAI said in a blog post.

Search features refined in the prototype will be woven into ChatGPT in the future, according to the San Francisco-based company.

Users will be able to interact with SearchGPT through conversational queries, and can ask follow-up questions as they might if speaking to a person, OpenAI said.

Google recently added AI-generated query result summaries -- referred to as "Overviews" -- to its search engine, causing worries among some that the move would result in fewer opportunities to serve up money-making ads.

This new feature offers written text at the top of results for Google searches, ahead of the traditional links to sites, which summarizes information that the engine believes answers the user's search query.

OpenAI's description of SearchGPT sounded similar to Google's Overviews.

Since the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, companies in the sector have been engaged in a frantic race to deploy generative AI programs for producing text, images and other content through prompts in everyday language.

"We are innovating at every layer of the AI stack," Google chief Sundar Pichai said this week during an earnings call for parent company Alphabet, which he also heads.

OpenAI said it was working with some publishers to refine SearchGPT, which is being kept separate from the training of its generative AI foundation models.

"AI search is going to become one of the key ways that people navigate the internet, and it's crucial, in these early days, that the technology is built in a way that values, respects, and protects journalism and publishers," The Atlantic chief executive Nicholas Thompson said in the OpenAI blog post.

"We look forward to partnering with OpenAI in the process."

OpenAI has invited users to sign up on a waitlist to try SearchGPT.