ChatGPT’s Google search rival, SearchGPT, will launch at the end of this year, ushering in a new generation of OpenAI’s chatbot.
As reported by Press GazetteOpenAI’s head of media Varun Shetty told a conference in Brussels that the company planned to launch SearchGPT as part of ChatGPT by “the end of the year.”
SearchGPT is OpenAI’s AI-powered search engine that allows users to quickly get answers to questions without clicking through to another website. You can simply ask things like, “Did the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Miami Dolphins last night?” And if so, who scored?” and get a complete overview of the results.
However, SearchGPT is currently under testing and the reports on the AI search engine’s performance so far aren’t exactly great. In September, The Washington Post published an article with hands-on impressions of the search engine, and there was a sense that Google’s AI rival still had a lot of work to do.
Shetty’s confirmation that we’ll be trying SearchGPT before 2024 comes to an end suggests that OpenAI has managed to bring its product on par with other AI search engines like Perplexity and Arc Search.
War of the search engines
The launch of OpenAI’s search engine could be a turning point in both the development of AI and the battle for search engine supremacy. Google has been unrivaled for decades, but if there’s an AI product that can challenge its dominance, it’s likely one developed by AI’s pioneer OpenAI.
Compared to a traditional search engine, SearchGPT answers queries in natural language and identifies the source of the answers, so users can quickly access full articles. Shetty said, “This is the core experience we’re building, and here you can see the balance we’re trying to achieve between users and publishers.”
As it stands now, if you ask ChatGPT for an answer, it will give it to you without collecting the information. The arrival of SearchGPT should go some way to satisfying AI skeptics who want to read and consume original content rather than getting a short AI-generated summary.
I use AI on my iPhone 16 Pro Max as a way to quickly search the web with Arc Search, and while it’s been great so far, OpenAI’s entry into the space could be an absolute gamechanger. Time will tell if SearchGPT can really challenge Google to become the average Internet user’s favorite search engine.