OpenAI’s SearchGPT appears to get lost on first search
The new SearchGPT feature introduced by OpenAI has stumbled during its rollout as the first discovers Through The Atlantic Ocean. SearchGPT is a new tool designed to combine OpenAI’s AI models with real-time web data for faster, more accurate answers. It’s not generally available, but it represents OpenAI’s vision for how AI and search will work together in the future.
In a pre-recorded video showing SearchGPT, the tool gave incorrect information about the dates of the Appalachian Summer Festival in Boone, North Carolina. The dates of July 29 to August 16 that SearchGPT reported are far off from the dates of June 29 to July 27 when the event actually takes place. As reported by The Atlantic Ocean and further confirmedthe festival dates in SearchGPT’s response are when the box office is closed. You can watch the full demo here.
SearchGPT Still searching
AI hallucinations and errors are a perennial complaint, a universal problem that almost every AI user has encountered. In that sense, the error isn’t that big of a deal. However, the result does somewhat undermine OpenAI’s pitch for SearchGPT. With reliability and transparency at the core of SearchGPT, it stands out as a hallucination if it still occurs, according to OpenAI.
Of course, this isn’t a problem unique to OpenAI. You may recall the embarrassing mistakes made when Google introduced its AI assistant Bard (now Gemini). In that case, a live demo claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope had taken the first photos of a planet outside the solar system, even though they were actually taken by the European Very Large Telescope. It was so bad that some people were clamoring for a subsequent $100 billion dive in Google’s stock price to the blunder. You could argue that the mistake in a video that OpenAI could have recreated or edited at any time is worse than a real-time misstep.
Regardless of the mistake, OpenAI is unlikely to slow down in its development of AI search. The demand for accurate, fast answers to questions about things happening now has already fueled AI integration into existing search engines, including Google and Microsoft Bing. It’s also the driving force behind search-focused generative AI chatbots like You.com and Perplexity.
But if OpenAI can release its own option, specifically tied to ChatGPT, it will at least capture a solid share of the search AI market. Of course, that depends on whether people trust SearchGPT to give accurate answers. You could ask SearchGPT for the likelihood of that happening, but you could check it yourself to confirm what it says.