OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced last night what was an open secret. The company run by Sam Altman, backed by Microsoft since 2019 with an investment of 13 billion dollars, has finally launched its own search engine, SearchGPT. The move is seen as a challenge to Google, the great dominator to date in the search engine segment, which also competes with OpenAI with its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool, the Gemini model.
Altman wants to bring the success of ChatGPT, which many consider the best large language model on the market, to a sector that it had not yet entered, despite the fact that analysts considered it its logical area of growth. The great advances of generative AI, which is capable of creating content from a series of instructions, have dug the grave of two segments that are beginning to unify: voice assistants (such as Alexa or Siri) and conventional search engines. We are moving towards a single platform capable of dialoging like a human, analyzing documents (texts, audio, images or videos) in different domains and presenting all this information in an orderly manner.
SearchGPT is the bet in this race of OpenAI, a company with which Prisa Media, publisher of EL PAÍS, signed a collaboration agreement last March. The new OpenAI tool is, for the moment, being tested by 10,000 users in the US to “gather opinions”, although there is a waiting list which only Americans can sign up for.
One of the search engine features that the company itself highlights is the curation of responses. “We are committed to a growing ecosystem of publishers and creators,” OpenAI highlights in a statement. “For decades, search has been a fundamental means for publishers and creators to reach users. Now we are using AI to improve this experience, highlighting high-quality content in a conversational interface with multiple opportunities for users to participate.”
A new way to search
SearchGPT searches the Internet for information in real time and presents it to the user in an organized manner. Instead of offering a list of links, it presents it in text form, with images. The sources, which are linked, can be clicked on, but it is not necessary to do so. In an example shown on their websitethe search engine answers the query “music festivals in Boone, North Carolina, in August” with a series of snapshots of each event with its corresponding poster in miniature. The final result has a more finished appearance, almost as if it had been laid out. By clicking on a tab, you can display the links from where SearchGPT has taken the information it displays.
Another of the peculiarities of this search engine is that, once a query has been made, follow-up questions can be asked, “just as you would in a conversation with a person.” In another search example, in which the tool has been asked “what are the best varieties of tomatoes,” the user reads the information and then asks “which ones can I plant at this time of year.”
Unlike ChatGPT, the new search engine does not rely on the data it has been trained on to provide answers, but instead searches the Internet for information. “SearchGPT is a prototype of new search capabilities designed to combine the power of our AI models with information from the web to provide you with fast, timely answers from clear, relevant sources,” OpenAI says on its website. The search engine has an option called “visual answers” about which the company has not provided details at this time.
“Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort and often multiple attempts to get relevant results. We believe that by enhancing the conversational capabilities of our models with real-time information from the web, finding what you are looking for can be faster and easier,” reads the OpenAI website.
You can follow THE COUNTRY Technology in Facebook and X or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
