OpenAI’s SearchGPT: A Prototype for AI-Based Search Engines, and its OpenAI Connections to The Information, Bloomberg and Bloomberg

Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, was one of the first companies to release a generative AI search engine to the public when it launched an AI-powered version of Bing back in 2023 that relied on OpenAI’s large language models. The search experience from Microsoft has been changed to Copilot.

In another example, it explains when to plant tomatoes before breaking down different varieties of the plant. After the results are out, you can ask follow-up questions or open other links in the sidebar. Openai didn’t get to know how the visual answers works before it was published.

Publishers will have a way to manage how they appear. They can choose not to use their content for training OpenAI’s models.

Openai can use the released search engine as a prototype in many ways. First, if SearchGPT’s results are wildly incorrect — like when Google rolled out AI Overviews and told us to put glue on our pizza — it’s easier to say, well, it’s a prototype! There’s also potential for getting attributions wrong or maybe wholesale ripping off articles like Perplexity was accused of doing.

This new product has been whispered about for months now, with The Information reporting about its development in February, then Bloomberg reporting more in May. We reported at the same time that OpenAI had been aggressively trying to poach Google employees for a search team. A new website with hints toward the move was noticed by some X users.

Kayla Wood, a spokesperson for OpenAI, declined to provide a SearchGPT demo or an interview about the new tool for WIRED, but confirmed that the company has already given access to unnamed partners and publishers and improved aspects of the search engine based on their feedback.

When Google added AI Overviews to search results this May, the company also quickly ran into reliability problems, like recommending people add glue to pizza. OpenAI’s SearchGPT may use an approach to generative AI, called retrieval augmented generation, that is an industry standard for AI search and designed to lower the rate of hallucinations in chatbot answers. The RAG approach uses trusted information like a preferred news website to reference the data, and then creates output and links back to where they came from.

Bing was not a good success, with the artificial intelligence search engine producing strange, inappropriate, and incorrect answers. Bing’s market share grew only slightly after the change.

There’s also the question of potential copyright violations. Perplexity in particular is being criticized by publications for copying aspects of original journalism and ignoring requests not to take content from some websites. In OpenAI’s blog post, the company mentions its commitment to publishers: “SearchGPT is designed to help users connect with publishers by prominently citing and linking to them in searches.” Multiple companies, including Vox Media, The Atlantic, News Corp, and The Financial Times, have all signed licensing agreements with OpenAI this year.