OpenAI announced on Monday that it is rolling out ChatGPT-based internet search to all users, intensifying competition with existing search engine giant Google.
The San Francisco-based technology company had beefed up its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot with search engine capabilities in late October, but made the feature available only to paying subscribers.
According to OpenAI, with the help of the new public feature, users can now receive “quick and timely responses” accompanied by links to web sources, a functionality that traditionally relied on standard search engines.
The update allows the AI chatbot to provide real-time information from across the web, echoing Google search results.
“We’re bringing search to all logged-in ChatGPT free users,” OpenAI product manager Kevin Weil said in a video posted to YouTube.
“That means it will be available globally on all platforms where you use ChatGPT.”
Examples of the new interface demonstrated by OpenAI resembled the search results provided by Google and Google Maps, albeit without the advertising clutter.
They also looked similar to the interface of Perplexity, another AI-powered search engine that offers a more conversational version of Google by presenting the sources you reference in the response.
“We’re really making the ChatGPT experience better for you with fresh information from the web,” ChatGPT search product lead Adam Fry said in the video.
“We are rolling this out to hundreds of millions of users starting today.”
Instead of releasing 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.
Since their launch, data on AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude have been limited by time outages, so the answers they provided were out of date.
By contrast, Google and Microsoft combine AI-generated responses with web results.
The addition of online search to ChatGPT will raise more questions about the startup’s link with Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, which is also trying to expand the reach of its Bing search engine against Google.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has put his company on the path to becoming an internet powerhouse.
It successfully catapulted the company to a staggering $157 billion valuation in a recent fundraising round that included Microsoft, Tokyo-based conglomerate SoftBank and artificial intelligence chip maker Nvidia as investors.
Attracting new users with search engine capabilities will increase the company’s IT needs and costs, which are enormous.
