OpenAI has announced the launch of a ChatGPT-powered search engine that is set to compete directly with Google, potentially impacting the flow of internet traffic for news, sports scores, and other real-time information. The San Francisco-based company revealed that the search feature will initially be available to paid users of ChatGPT, with plans to extend it to all users in the future. A preview version was introduced to a limited group of users and publishers back in July.
The original iteration of ChatGPT, which was introduced in 2022, was trained on extensive collections of online texts but lacked the ability to respond to queries about current events not included in its training data. Google recently revamped its search engine by incorporating AI-generated written summaries into search results, aiming to provide quick answers to user queries without the need to click on external links for more information.
