When ChatGPT burst into the mainstream at the close of 2022, many users were left scratching their heads, struggling to pigeonhole this radical new technology. Was it a search engine, Wikipedia 2.0, or the mother of all chatbots?
The answer was all of the above, but as OpenAI has continued to tweak its LLM and interface, and the concept of GenAI is more widely understood, ChatGPT has become recognized as a GenAI assistant. Now, OpenAI is creating clearer boundaries, and attempting to rival the big players in search with SearchGPT, a prototype AI-powered search engine.
What is SearchGPT?
SearchGPT is described by OpenAI as a “temporary prototype of new AI search features” and users are invited to join a waitlist to try it out. The company is keen to stress that these features are in the testing phase, with access limited to a select roster of users and publishers for feedback.
Ultimately, the features unite OpenAI’s LLMs with data scraped directly from the internet to provide timely results to search queries. The aim is to make searches quicker and simpler than alternatives.
Along with the results from searches, laid out familiarly with an accompanying image, users are provided a direct link to the web page where the results came from. SearchGPT also enables users to ask follow-up questions in context to build on searches and refine the results.
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The Intellectual Property Dilemma
I recently reported on the fallout from Perplexity’s failure to name sources and follow the robots.txt protocol, the mechanism used by publishers to determine which content was available to third parties. The issue of intellectual property (IP) in the AI age is a big one. With SearchGPT, OpenAI has addressed it.
The company is working closely with publishers to develop SerchGPT’s capabilities in a way that respects IP and surfaces high-quality content. SearchGPT’s results are intended for search purposes and are not used to train OpenAI’s LLMs. The company is rolling out a feature that enables publishers to manage how their content appears in SearchGPT results.
“AI search is going to become one of the key ways that people navigate the internet, and it’s crucial, in these early days, that the technology is built in a way that values, respects, and protects journalism and publishers,” said Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic. “We look forward to partnering with OpenAI in the process and creating a new way for readers to discover The Atlantic.”
Should Google be worried?
Google is the undisputed king of search, with over 80 percent of desktop search traffic running through its platform. Furthermore, Google has already begun integrating search with Gemini, its family of LLMs.
The functionality is enabling, for select regions and user groups, AI Overviews that provide users with concise explanations in answer to search queries, video recognition, and more. Ultimately, Google is ahead of the game. It will take a huge leap for a significant number of users to abandon Google Search for another alternative.
Even so, the enormous popularity of ChatGPT and the aim to integrate search capabilities into the platform could start to eat into Google’s dominance. What stands out most about SearchGPT is the partnership with publishers. As discussions around IP and the role of GenAI in disseminating information continue, regulators will no doubt begin to clamp down on companies that fail to respect the rules of ownership. This puts OpenAI in a favorable position.
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