OpenAI has finally turned ChatGPT into an AI-powered search engine, bridging the gap with competitors like Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini, who have long offered internet access to their chatbot conversations. Starting Thursday, the company is enabling the search engine-like functionality in ChatGPT conversations for its paid users and SearchGPT waitlist users. It will expand to its free, enterprise, and education users in the coming weeks.
ChatGPT Search isn’t quite like your regular web browser search. Like Copilot and Gemini, OpenAI has baked the search engine functionality into ChatGPT’s existing interface. The chatbot will decide on its own whether it needs to venture out to the World Wide Web to answer your question. You can also manually choose to search the web by clicking the web search icon.
Regardless of your search query, ChatGPT will link back all relevant sources and citations — any pages accessed on the internet so you can look for yourself. However, the information itself is presented in a pretty good layout. You can get anything from interaction stock graphs, maps, scoreboards, weather tables, etc.
A new Sources button at the bottom of the response will open a sidebar with all relevant references. OpenAI also noted in its announcement of the feature that it has partnered with news and data providers to add updated information and new visual designs for categories like weather, stocks, sports, news, and maps.
The underlying model beneath ChatGPT Search is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o. Additionally, despite having access to the internet now, the company reportedly plans to continue to refresh its training data to ensure the most accurate and updated answers possible. Remember that this is different from the training of the models themselves, so we’ll have to wait and see how the feature ages once it reaches its 250 million active monthly users as of October 2024.
Additionally, while the feature might not be new, ChatGPT has a major advantage over something like Google’s Gemini — it isn’t littered with ads and sponsored links pinned to the top. It’s no secret that Google makes a ton of money off of its advertisements, meaning they inevitably pollute AI-generated results in its AI Overview feature (which has now expanded to over 100 countries) and sometimes in Gemini’s answers.
The Verge reports that there are currently no plans for advertisements in ChatGPT. That said, AI-powered search is more expensive to run compared to traditional search, so it isn’t exactly clear how OpenAI is going to finance the cost of hundreds of millions of users putting ChatGPT Search through the paces every day. There are plans to implement limits on how often free users can use the feature though.
In the News: Phishing kit uses over 2,000 websites to target people globally
