SearchGPT: OpenAI announces new AI search tool

The owner of ChatGPT announced, on Thursday (25), its own search site, SearchGPT, which will allow users to search for texts, websites and images using artificial intelligence (AI).

The website, which will be independent from ChatGPT, will be a kind of “OpenAI Google”: a page with a search bar so that users can type in their questions followed by an answer that can be in the form of text, images or information cards.

The similarities, however, should end there. According to the company, one of the features that the tool brings is a context field. In other words, with each new search, the tool accumulates knowledge from previous searches, something that resembles a dialogue between two people, an extension of what a conversation with ChatGPT would be, for example.

The resource announced by OpenAI is the result of a formula that currently seems unbeatable, says professor Fábio de Miranda, coordinator of the Computer Science course at Insper: AI and information produced by real people.

“The strategy of first gathering real information and asking the LLM or IA to summarize it is consolidating itself as a winner. The GPT 3.5 matrices had 175 billion numbers, the GPT-4 matrices have 1.5 trillion, but he still hallucinates, inventing facts”, says Miranda. “Using a more classic search engine and then AI seems to be the way to offer a good search service.”

Eduardo de Rezende Francisco, from the Technology and Data Science (TDS) department at FGV EAESP, agrees that OpenAI’s entry into the field reinforces the new recipe for another generation of web searches.

“This seems to be the principle that will guide this entire wave of intelligent search engines, like Google AI Overview and now SearchGPT. This will mean a radical change in the way people search for things on the internet”, explains Francisco.

The trend, which could be the beginning of what we will see in all search engines in the future, is also a milestone for Sam Altman’s company in relation to real-time information: when ChatGPT was launched, in November 2022, it contained information only until September 2021. Other versions released later also did not keep up with the updates and were always behind in the knowledge they could use.

Now, with a time window that updates every day, OpenAI can overcome this barrier by working with information in real time and organically with internet searches. It is this element that should change the game for the company.

“It means more usefulness for the end user, and marks an admission by OpenAI that it is not possible to trust 100% on the merged information that was stored in the AI ​​during training”, says Miranda. “Now that it seems clear that there will not be big leaps in AI capabilities every year, the way forward seems to be to design systems in a smarter way. AI engineering is consolidating.”

Operation

According to company images, search results on SearchGPT are not presented in a list of links, as Google already does. Responses are grouped and more organized. In the examples, the company also shows that, for each text generated by a search, original reference links to the content will be shown.

The use of AI in research is not an OpenAI innovation. This year, Google launched AI Overviews, a tool that uses AI in searches. The resource also summarizes content and then presents links, images and cards that can help to deepen the search, said Liz Reid, the company’s head of search, during the launch of the tool in May this year.

AI Overviews is already being tested in Brazil, as Estadão found out. Upon its debut, however, the resource was met with skepticism after a series of erroneous recommendations. In one of them, which became famous and generated memes, a user asked how he could keep the melted cheese on top of a piece of pizza without it slipping. Google responded that just using glue would solve the problem.

As a result, the search giant reduced the distribution of the tool. OpenAI’s entry into this field could be the push to develop new LLMs capable of delivering better search results. In addition to being able to become a serious competitor to the more than 90% dominance of research that Sundar Pichai’s company has today.

But the arrival of the new site also increases the shadow over Google, which is now threatened not only by ChatGPT, but by other search engines that use AI in a smarter way. One example is Perplexity AI, which received investments from names like Jeff Bezos to revolutionize searches with generative AI.

“In the medium term, the tendency is for this new mechanism to prove much more adherent, convenient and intuitive, especially if it is linked to audio searches. This should cause the ‘google.com’ paradigm to lose ground and have to reinvent itself. This movement tends to significantly change the market”, points out Francisco.

With the OpenAI tool in the testing phase, it is still too early to know whether it will be able to compete with Google or even take away its historical advantage in search tools. But the threat that the service could grow already exists, especially if it depends on an audience that has already become accustomed to the use of artificial intelligence and is looking for new alternatives for consuming content on the internet.

“There is an audience that has adopted ChatGPT as a standard search interface in recent years, such as a portion of teenagers. If OpenAI starts offering a search that is based on real sources, this audience may never need Google”, explains Miranda.

For now, OpenAI stated that it is only distributing the tool to some users for feedback, there are around 10 thousand guests. There is a waiting list that can be activated on the SearchGPT website for anyone who wants to take part in testing the resource. The company has not announced any expected date for the global launch of its search site. However, the company hopes to integrate the platform with ChatGPT.

When that happens, the fight for the search crown will really heat up.

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