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 site, which will be independent of ChatGPT, will be a kind of “OpenAI’s Google”: a page with a search bar so users can type 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 like, 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 LLM or AI to summarize it is proving to be a winning one. GPT 3.5’s matrices had 175 billion numbers, GPT-4’s have 1.5 trillion, but it still hallucinates, inventing facts,” says Miranda. “Using a more classic search engine and then an 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 whole wave of intelligent search engines, such as 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 terms of real-time information: when ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, it only contained information up to 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 daily, OpenAI can overcome this barrier by working with real-time and organic information from internet searches. This is the element that should be a game-changer for the company.
“It means more utility for the end user, and marks an admission by OpenAI that you can’t 100% trust the merged information that was stored in the AI during training,” says Miranda. “Now that it seems clear that there won’t be huge leaps in AI capabilities every year, the way forward seems to be to design systems smarter. AI engineering is taking hold.”
Operation
According to the company’s images, the results of searches on SearchGPT are not presented in a list of links, as Google already does. The answers are grouped and more organized. In the examples, the company also shows that, for each text generated by a search, original reference links of the content will be shown.
The use of AI in searches is not something new for OpenAI. Google launched AI Overviews this year, a tool that uses AI in searches. The feature also summarizes content and then presents links, images and cards that can help 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. However, when it was first launched, the feature was met with skepticism after a series of incorrect recommendations. In one of them, which became famous and generated memes, a user asked how he could keep the cheese melted on top of a slice of pizza without it slipping. Google responded that all he had to do was use glue to solve the problem.
As a result, the search giant has 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, it could become a serious competitor to the more than 90% dominance of searches that Sundar Pichai’s company currently has.
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 has received investments from the likes of Jeff Bezos to revolutionize searches with generative AI.
“In the medium term, the tendency is for this new mechanism to prove to be 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 OpenAI’s tool still 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 engines. But the threat that the service could grow already exists, especially if it depends on an audience that has already become accustomed to using artificial intelligence and is looking for new alternatives to consume content on the internet.
“There is an audience that has adopted ChatGPT as their default 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 said it is only distributing the tool to a select few users for feedback, with around 10,000 invited users. There is a waiting list that can be activated on SearchGPT’s own website for anyone who wants to take part in testing the feature. The company has not announced any expected date for the global launch of its search engine. However, the company hopes to integrate the platform with ChatGPT.
When that happens, the fight for the search crown will really heat up.
Source: CNN Brasil
Charles Grill is a tech-savvy writer with over 3 years of experience in the field. He writes on a variety of technology-related topics and has a strong focus on the latest advancements in the industry. He is connected with several online news websites and is currently contributing to a technology-focused platform.
