OpenAI releases ChatGPT search engine

Published November 1, 2024 Updated November 1, 2024 06:59am

SAN FRANCISCO: 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.

Published in Dawn, November 1st, 2024

Opinion

Editorial

Seeking investment
Updated 01 Nov, 2024

Seeking investment

Foreign visits will be fruitless unless crucial structural, policy reforms directly affecting investors are focused.
State-backed terror
01 Nov, 2024

State-backed terror

OVER the past year or so, India’s reportedly malign activities in foreign countries have increasingly come under the radar, with
Shared crisis
01 Nov, 2024

Shared crisis

WITH Lahore experiencing unprecedented levels of smog, the Punjab government has announced a series of “green...
Property valuation
Updated 31 Oct, 2024

Property valuation

Market valuation rates will not help boost tax revenues without plugging such loopholes in the system.
Hitting a wall
31 Oct, 2024

Hitting a wall

PAKISTAN still has a long way to go in defeating polio. Despite our decades-long fight against the debilitating...
Kurram violence
31 Oct, 2024

Kurram violence

DESPITE years of intermittent and bloody conflict in Kurram, the state has been unable to bring lasting peace to ...