The artificial intelligence company OpenAI announced on Thursday, October 31, the launch of a search engine integrated into its flagship product, ChatGPT. Like Google or Bing, the conversational agent can now produce responses based on content recently published online. Until now ChatGPT was based on a “finite” corpus: its sources did not go beyond the year 2023, which prevented it from correctly responding to queries relating, for example, to news, weather or sports results.
This feature is currently available to paid users and should be available to everyone in a few months. Specifically, all you have to do is ask ChatGPT a question (“Where can I dine in Positano tonight?” », “What will the weather be like next weekend?” », “How to arrange a garden? »among the questions proposed as a demonstration by OpenAI), and will offer a written answer, which can now be based on recent information (the weather, restaurant reviews, etc.). All of this accompanied by links to sources and complemented with images or graphics. It is also possible to ask additional questions, “and ChatGPT will take into account the entire context of your discussion to give you the most relevant response”specifies OpenAI.
“Looking for useful answers on the web can take a lot of effort”explains the company in a press release. “This often requires performing multiple searches and sorting through links to find quality sources and the right information. Now ChatGPT can give you a better answer. » By positioning itself in search functionality, OpenAI enters into direct competition with Google and Microsoft (which owns 49% of its capital). Both companies already integrate AI into their traditional search engines, and their chatbots, Gemini and Copilot, already have a search function.
Media associations
OpenAI has been preparing the ground for months, in particular through partnerships with several press publishers, including the world, Time Magazinethe News Corp group (owner of Wall Street Journal) or the German group Axel Springer. OpenAI may rely on its content to provide answers to its users, but promises that it will not prioritize these sources over others, and that those who do not wish to appear on ChatGPT will be able to report this. Relations between OpenAI and the press are not always good: the company is being sued in particular by the New York Times for copyright infringement: the famous American newspaper accuses him of having trained his AI model on its content without authorization.
The quality of the results of the ChatGPT search engine will be closely monitored, especially a few days before the US presidential elections, when chatbots regularly produce “hallucinations” (errors or pure inventions). Adam Fry, responsible for this new product, assured in a press conference that OpenAI would provide a “special attention” to requests relating to the election.
