SearchGPT: Open AI takes on Google with its own AI search engine
Open AI is finally making its foray into search. The San Francisco company has recently announced a new AI tool with search capabilities. First reported by The Information in February this year, the new tool is aptly called SearchGPT and features a classic interface with a large rounded-rectangular text box for accepting search prompts.
What follows is a high level summary of the results of the search, complete with links to the relevant real-time sources. SearchGPT runs on the GPT 4 model and can handle follow up questions while retaining context. Alternatively, the user can open a sidebar for more search findings. SearchGPT can also provide visual search answers with images and even videos from Sora, its AI video generator.
AI web search appears to be the latest fad in Big Tech despite the myriad issues that arise. Chief among these is the inevitable tendency of AI models to hallucinate or make up entirely fictitious facts to even straightforward prompts. Case in point: Google's consistently flubbing AI Overviews. Perplexity’s so-called “answer engine” has had a better handle on their AI summaries, yet the startup is up to its neck in even more serious problems with allegations of copyright infringement and even full-blown plagiarism.
On the matter of copyright, Open AI is taking the road less traveled. The company is collaborating with publishers and creators to grant them more choice in how they appear in the AI search results. Meticulous link attribution for responses should also allow users to quickly identify the sources of information – and keep publishers happy.
SearchGPT will also be able to list sites that choose to opt out of providing up their content for training ChatGPT models. In its announcement for SearchGPT, the AI company was keen to make a clear distinction between the two:
SearchGPT is about search and is separate from training Open AI's generative AI foundational models."
Yet, Open AI acknowledges that the endgame is to integrate AI search into ChatGPT, reiterating that SearchGPT is merely a prototype. The Verge reports that SearchGPT will be free at launch, albeit limited to ten thousand users chosen from the waitlist.
Still, SearchGPT does not solve the persistent issue of AI hallucinations. The prerecorded demo available on Open AI’s blog pulls up a list of concerts for the prompt “music festivals in boone north august”, one of which was discovered to display incorrect dates. Fabrications of this sort are nothing new with AI, nevertheless they certainly call into question the reliability of findings from an AI search engine. Perhaps this, like the increasing energy costs, is a necessary trade-off in the age of AI.
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