Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, at the Hope Global Forums annual meeting in Atlanta on Dec. 11, 2023.
Dustin Chambers | Bloomberg | Getty Images
OpenAI on Thursday announced a prototype of its own search engine, called SearchGPT, aimed to give users “fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources.” The company said it eventually plans to integrate the tool, which is currently being tested with a small group of users, into its viral chatbot, ChatGPT.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, Alphabet investors have been concerned that OpenAI could take market share from Google in search by giving consumers new ways to seek information online. With this prototype, OpenAI is testing the waters for doing just that.
Alphabet shares were trading about 2.5% lower on Thursday, while the Nasdaq was up slightly.
In May, the company launched AI Overview, which CEO Sundar Pichai called the biggest change in search in 25 years, to a limited audience, allowing users to see a summary of answers to queries at the very top of Google Search.
Though Google had been working on AI Overview for more than a year, public criticism mounted after users quickly noticed that queries returned nonsensical or inaccurate results within the AI feature — without any way to opt out.
The SearchGPT announcement follows OpenAI’s launch last Thursday of a new AI model, “GPT-4o mini.” The new model is an offshoot of GPT-4o, the startup’s fastest and most powerful model to date, which it launched in May during a livestreamed event with executives.
OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, has been valued at more than $80 billion by investors. The company, founded in 2015, is under pressure to stay on top of the generative AI market while finding ways to make money as it spends massive sums on processors and infrastructure to build and train its models.
Both OpenAI’s new mini AI model and the prototype of SearchGPT are part of the company’s push to be at the forefront of “multimodality,” or the ability to offer a wide range of types of AI-generated media, like text, images, audio, video and search, inside one tool: ChatGPT.
Last year, OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap told CNBC: “The world is multimodal. If you think about the way we as humans process the world and engage with the world, we see things, we hear things, we say things — the world is much bigger than text. So to us, it always felt incomplete for text and code to be the single modalities, the single interfaces that we could have to how powerful these models are and what they can do.”
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