OpenAI Launches SearchGPT (an AI-Powered Search Engine)

SearchGPT is here and that's finally a piece of good news for bloggers many media houses have been struggling to rank well on Google.

Yes, OpenAI has now officially released the new search engine called SearchGPT which is a new strategic product of OpenAI (currently onboarding users on a waitlist) and it is OpenAI's direct answer to Google and other AI-powered search engines such as Perplexity and Bing's Copilot. The incorporation of AI elements in Google search shows that the application of AI will be increasingly essential for retaining market dominance.

The release of SearchGPT also comes at a time when OpenAI is facing issues with high operational costs. Based on the article from The Information, the AI training and inference expense of OpenAI could amount to $7bn this year.

On the other hand, perplexity has been in the news for allegedly stealing content in its AI summaries, implying that AI invention is not without its problems, especially concerning the ethical use of content.

This new search engine relies on the GPT-4 family of models to give users immediate access to information, making this a potential SearchGPT to fundamentally change how people use search engines around the globe.

SearchGPT SERPs Demo

SearchGPT has a simple design beginning with the search bar that says, ‘What are you looking for?’ Unlike most search engines that provide links to webpages, OpenAI's SearchGPT disseminates and categorizes information.

• For instance, a search for music festivals in Boone, North Carolina in August 2024 yields brief, accurate definitions of events complete with links to the source.
• Another example is the query on planting tomatoes offering specific information on various types of tomatoes and the best time to plant them, proving that it can cover various topics successfully.

SearchGPT’s most expected feature is the ‘visual answers’ where the searches are supported by AI-created videos and images. Although details on this feature are still unknown, it is said to enrich searches by offering the user visual results information in addition to text​ that would make the search a lot more fun.

To the side of the web results, users can ask follow-up questions or click on other related links to the search.

This dynamic interaction model of SearchGPT is developed to make the process of finding the needed information less formal and as complete as possible.

Well, SearchGPT is announced, and launched too, but it is still behind a waiting list and will be offered to a few people around the globe, here's how many people will be able to test SearchGPT:

First, SearchGPT will be publicly available to only 10,000 testers.

You can go to ChatGPT.com/search to register yourself to get early access to the SearchGPT prototype.

To achieve high quality and relevance of the search results on the SERPs, OpenAI is sourcing its data from third-party partners and employing direct content feeds.

The end game is to bake these search capabilities into ChatGPT itself, thus merging conversational AI with traditional search capabilities and making it stronger than any other GPT or LLM could be.

Soon after this news hit, Alphabet shares took a dip for 2.5% lower trading while Nasdaq was up, CNBC reported.

To avoid misuse of content in SearchGPT the company has partnered with news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, and Vox Media among others.

There is an option for publishers to control how their content looks and is displayed in search results while also disallowing the use of their content to train AI models but still appearing in the search results.

This is in an attempt to respond to issues to do with content authorship and usage as a way of differentiating OpenAI from its competitors.

Opinion?

• Sundar Pichai who claimed that Google’s AI Overview feature is the biggest change in search in the last 25 years dubbing it as revolutionary and a direct answer to ChatGPT’s text-based answering will now have to rethink as SearchGPT is already here with an interface that’s seems better than Google.

As thousands of millions of users use the free version of ChatGPT and take up computing resources, OpenAI needs to look for profitable business models for SearchGPT, which is initially ad-free and unmonetized. 

So, there's a lot more coming to SearchGPT and I will be here to update you on that.