Tuesday, December 17, 2024
Year : 2, Issue: 16
AFP: OpenAI on Monday said it is making ChatGPT-powered internet search available to all users, escalating its threat to Google’s dominance.
The San Francisco-based tech firm had beefed up its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot with search engine capabilities in late October, but made the feature available only to paying subscribers.
The newly public feature enables users to receive “fast, timely answers” with links to relevant web sources –- information that previously required using a traditional search engine, the company said.
The upgrade to ChatGPT enables the AI chatbot to provide real-time information from across the web.
“We’re bringing search to all logged-in free users of ChatGPT,” OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil said in a video posted at YouTube.
Examples of the new interface demonstrated by OpenAI resembled search results provided by Google and Google Maps, though without the clutter of advertising.
They also appeared similarly to the interface of Perplexity, another AI-powered search engine that offers a more conversational version of Google by featuring the sources it referenced in the answer. “We’re really just making the ChatGPT experience that you know better with up-to-date information from the web,” ChatGPT Search product lead Adam Fry said in the video.
“We’re rolling this out to hundreds of millions of users, starting today.”
Rather than launching a separate product, OpenAI has integrated search directly into ChatGPT.
Users can enable the search feature by default or activate it manually via a web search icon.
