OpenAI launches an online search engine in direct competition with Google. This opens up a whole new front in the race for commercialisation of advances in artificial intelligence.
The San Francisco-based firm opened a waiting list of 10,000 people on Thursday to test its experimental product.
The product looks different from ChatGPT because it offers a rail of hyperlinks, similar to a web search engine, that allow users to click to other websites.
SearchGPT was created with the help of publishers with whom OpenAI recently signed agreements, such as News Corp. Axel Springer.
OpenAI, which has received $13bn in investment from Microsoft – Google’s main AI rival over the past few years – aims to integrate AI search capabilities into its flagship bot.
OpenAI has made this move to compete with Google, the online search leader for the last two decades. OpenAI has been at the forefront of the race to develop powerful AI chatbots.
OpenAI is looking for new revenue streams while Google tries to protect its profit margins.
Search giant built up cash-cow that generated $175bn in revenues last year. This is more than half its total sales. AI advances have opened up the market for new competitors, including Perplexity. The two-year old start-up bills itself as “answer engines” and has soared to a $1bn value.
Google has been slow in pivoting its search engine to generative AI, but, US users have begun to see “AI Overviews” — a short AI-generated summary of answers to queries — on the top of most common search results. This is followed by clickable hyperlinks interspersed with ads lower down.
Google is more expensive to provide these types of results that include “AI-powered snap shots” than it would be if they used its standard responses. This is because generative AI uses more computing resources.
In April, it was reported that Google had considered imposing a fee for “premium search” features powered by generative AI. This would have been the biggest shakeup in its business model ever.
OpenAI’s biggest challenge in AI-generated searches is that chatbots such as ChatGPT can be prone to “hallucinating”, or responding incorrectly, facts, numbers, and references.
The chatbot is able to do this in part because it uses highly complex models to predict patterns of language and not crawl, index, or surface information from the web as traditional search engines.
Google’s AI reviews have also faced problems. The feature first appeared in US Search Results. It told users to eat rocks, to put cheese on pizza, and to describe former US President Barack Obama as a Muslim.
OpenAI says that SearchGPT “will provide up-to date information from the internet while giving you links to relevant sources”. OpenAI says that the new SearchGPT will allow users to access websites even if they do not want to train OpenAI’s AI tools such as ChatGPT.
News publishers have been upset by AI companies, accusing them of violating their copyrights when they scrape data from websites or regurgitate sections of articles.
The New York Times filed OpenAI last year and its principal backer Microsoft for “profit[ing]” from “massive copyright infringements, commercial exploitations and misappropriation The Times’s Intellectual Property”, which OpenAI refutes.
The start-up said that it has developed licensing relationships with several publishing companies, and has worked with their product teams to test and design the search tool.
Robert Thomson, News Corp.’s chief executive, said: “[OpenAI] understand that in order for AI-powered searches to be effective, they must be based on the most accurate and reliable information provided by trusted sources.”
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