OpenAI enters the search-engine market by announcing “SearchGPT”, its AI-powered search-engine. OpenAI was seen working on this since the start of 2024 and finally it unveils the prototype of its AI-search engine to compete with Google, Perplexity.
OpenAI has rolled out several AI models and upgrades since 2020 which pushed the deployment of artificial intelligence by industries aggressively. And this new search-engine model is another such AI which would disrupt the search-engine market, cracking the foundation of Google, which it had sustained for the past two decades.
What is SearchGPT?
SearchGPT is an AI search-engine by OpenAI that uses AI to provide up-to-date timely answers with clear and relevant sources. ChatGPT-4 (current version) on the other hand can only provide timely answers up to April 2023.
OpenAI’s search engine shows a large textbox asking “What are you looking for?” like Microsoft Bing. But the search results are somewhat different. Rather than returning a plain list of links, SearchGPT organizes the results that would provide value to users by only showing what’s needed.
In one example, when asked about “music festivals in Boone North Carolina in august,” the AI search displayed the summarized list of several music festivals with a small description of the events followed by an attribution link.
SearchGPT also features “visual answers” where it shows AI-generated videos or images. But it’s not sure until now on how this “visual answers” actually works.
The AI search is powered by GPT-4 model and the goal is to eventually integrate the search features directly into ChatGPT. As of now, SearchGPT is just a prototype and can be accessible only by 10,000 test users at launch.
SearchGPT & Google
OpenAI’s tremendous growth in recent years with the upgrades of AI models has been a nightmare for its competitors, especially Google. Google had undisturbed dominance in search-engine market in the past two decades (with 83.49% market share), and OpenAI’s recent announcement of SearchGPT might be a headache for the company.
After the announcement of this SearchGPT, Alphabet shares fell more than 3%. Though Google rolled out AI overviews months back, the summaries of answers were inaccurate, leaving users confused and baffled. For example, Google’s AI search told us to put glue on our pizza.
If SearchGPT circumvented these mistakes, OpenAI has a good possibility to take on Google’s dominance in search-engine business.
Road Ahead
ChatGPT now has 100 million weekly active users as of June 2024. However, OpenAI is burning its cash on ChatGPT and other AI models, in which the AI training and inference costs alone could reach $7 billion this year.
While concerns were raised about AI models using websites’ content for training its models without paying the publishers, OpenAI finds a way to solve this, by partnering with news publishers. It partnered with The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press and Vox Media for feeding its AI search.
Publishers will have a way to “manage how they appear in OpenAI search features,” the company writes. They can opt out of having their content used to train OpenAI’s models and still be surfaced in search.
SearchGPT will be free during its initial launch, and since the feature appears to have no ads right now, it’s clear the company will have to figure out monetization soon.
(For more such interesting informational, technology and innovation stuffs, keep reading The Inner Detail).
Kindly add ‘The Inner Detail’ to your Google News Feed by following us!
