OpenAI to launch ‘SearchGPT’ in challenge to Google

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OpenAI is launching an online search tool in a direct challenge to Google, opening up a new front in the tech industry’s race to commercialise advances in generative artificial intelligence.

The experimental product, known as SearchGPT, will initially only be available to a small group of users, with the San Francisco-based company opening a 10,000-person waiting list to test the service on Thursday.

The product is visually distinct from ChatGPT as it goes beyond generating a single answer by offering a rail of links — similar to a search engine — that allows users to click through to external websites. 

SearchGPT was developed with feedback from publishers that OpenAI has recently signed deals with, including News Corp, Axel Springer and the Financial Times.

OpenAI, which is backed with $13bn investment from Microsoft — Google’s biggest rival in AI over recent years — aims to eventually reintegrate the AI search features into its flagship chatbot. 

The move is the latest effort by OpenAI, which has led the way in the early race to build powerful AI chatbots, to take on Google, which has dominated online search for the past two decades.

The rise of generative AI and the battle over the future of the search market could transform the trajectory of both companies, as Google seeks to defend its profit margins while OpenAI hunts new revenue streams.

The search giant has built up a cash cow that brought in $175bn of revenues last year, worth more than half of its total sales. Advances in AI have opened the way for competitors including Perplexity, a two-year-old start-up billing itself as an “answer engine” that has shot to a $1bn valuation. 

Google has been slow to pivot its search engine towards generative AI but, in May, US users began to see an “AI Overview” — a brief AI-generated summary answer to queries — at the top of many common search results, followed by clickable links interspersed with advertisements lower down.

These kinds of search results, which include an “AI-powered snapshot”, are more costly for Google to serve up than its traditional responses because generative AI consumes more computing resources.

The Financial Times reported in April that Google has considered charging for “premium” search features powered by generative AI, in what would be the biggest ever shake-up of its business model.

For OpenAI, the big challenge with AI-generated search so far is that chatbots like ChatGPT are prone to responding inaccurately, or “hallucinating” facts, numbers and references.

This is, in part, because the highly complex models that underpin the chatbot are trained to predict patterns in language, not to crawl, index and surface information on the web like traditional search engines. 

Google’s AI overviews have faced similar issues. When the feature was first rolled out in US search results, they told users that eating rocks could be healthy, advised them to glue cheese to pizza and described former US president Barack Obama as a Muslim.

SearchGPT will instead “provide up-to-date information from the web while giving you clear links to relevant sources”, according to OpenAI. The new search tool will be able to access sites even if they have opted out of training OpenAI’s generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT.

AI companies have caused controversy among news publishers, who have accused tech companies of breaching copyright by scraping data from websites and regurgitating sections of articles without attribution.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and its main backer Microsoft last year for “profit[ing] from the massive copyright infringement, commercial exploitation and misappropriation of The Times’s intellectual property”, claims which OpenAI refutes. 

Amid the conflict, the start-up has built licensing relationships with several publishers, which it said has tested and designed the search tool with publishers’ product teams.

“[OpenAI] innately understand that for AI-powered search to be effective, it must be founded on the highest quality, most reliable information furnished by trusted sources,” said Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp.