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OpenAI is announcing its much-anticipated entry into the search market, SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine with real-time access to information across the internet.

The search engine starts with a large textbox that asks the user What are you looking for? But rather than returning a plain list of links, SearchGPT tries to organize and make sense of them. In one example from OpenAI, the search engine summarizes its findings on music festivals and then presents short descriptions of the events followed by an attribution link.

In another example, it explains when to plant tomatoes before breaking down different varieties of the plant. After the results appear, you can ask follow-up questions or click the sidebar to open other relevant links. Theres also a feature called visual answers, but OpenAI didnt get back to The Verge before publication on exactly how this works.

SearchGPT is just a prototype for now. The service is powered by the GPT-4 family of models and will only be accessible to 10,000 test users at launch, OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood tells The Verge. Wood says that OpenAI is working with third-party partners and using direct content feeds to build its search results. The goal is to eventually integrate the search features directly into ChatGPT.

Its the start of what could become a meaningful threat to Google, which has rushed to bake in AI features across its search engine, fearing that users will flock to competing products that offer the tools first. It also puts OpenAI in more direct competition with the startup Perplexity, which bills itself as an AI answer engine. Perplexity has recently come under criticism for an AI summaries feature that publishers claimed was directly ripping off their work.

OpenAI seems to have taken note of the blowback and says its taking a markedly different approach. In a blog post, the company emphasized that SearchGPT was developed in collaboration with various news partners, which include organizations like the owners of The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and Vox Media, the parent company of The Verge. News partners gave valuable feedback, and we continue to seek their input, Wood says.

Publishers will have a way to manage how they appear in OpenAI search features, the company writes. They can opt out of having their content used to train OpenAIs models and still be surfaced in search.

Responses have clear, in-line, named attribution and links

SearchGPT is designed to help users connect with publishers by prominently citing and linking to them in searches, according to OpenAIs blog post. Responses have clear, in-line, named attribution and links so users know where information is coming from and can quickly engage with even more results in a sidebar with source links.

Releasing its search engine as a prototype helps OpenAI in a few different ways. First, if SearchGPTs results are wildly incorrect like when Google rolled out AI Overviews and told us to put glue on our pizza its easier to say, well, its a prototype! Theres also potential for getting attributions wrong or maybe wholesale ripping off articles like Perplexity was accused of doing.

This new product has been whispered about for months now, with The Information reporting about its development in February, then Bloomberg reporting more in May. We reported at the same time that OpenAI had been aggressively trying to poach Google employees for a search team. Some X users also noticed a new website OpenAI has been working on that hinted toward the move.

OpenAI has slowly been bringing ChatGPT more in touch with the real-time web. When GPT-3.5 was released, the AI model was already months out of date. Last September, OpenAI released a way for ChatGPT to browse the internet, called Browse with Bing, but it appears a lot more rudimentary than SearchGPT.

The rapid advancements by OpenAI have won ChatGPT millions of users, but the companys costs are adding up. The Information reported this week that OpenAIs AI training and inference costs could reach $7 billion this year, with the millions of users on the free version of ChatGPT only further driving up compute costs. SearchGPT will be free during its initial launch, and since the feature appears to have no ads right now, its clear the company will have to figure out monetization soon.

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OpenAI announces SearchGPT, its AI-powered search engine - The Verge