OpenAI would be about to release a new feature for ChatGPT which allows a use similar to that of a search engine: an alternative to Google capable of answering user questions via artificial intelligence by taking information from the web (Wikipedia, newspaper articles, etc.), reporting the sources used, simultaneously generating summaries and offering relevant multimedia content. It would be a product capable of merging the linguistic abilities expressed by GPT-4 with the possibility of searching for textual or multimedia content in the world Wide Web. The indiscretion is taken up by various sources, including Bloombergwho even talk about the launch of the search.chatgpt.com site for today 9 May 2024, but at the moment the site is not active and there are no official communications from OpenAI.
How OpenAI's search engine could work
How it works has not yet been revealed, however we can hypothesize that the features will be similar to those expressed by Perplexitya search engine that takes advantage of the linguistic capabilities of the GPT-3.5 model. Using Perplexity, in fact, we find ourselves interacting with a chatbot which, in addition to a response to our request, also shows us the list of websites from which it has extrapolated the contents.
It is therefore conceivable that the future search engine of OpenAI will be able to provide, at the same time as answer, not only the links to the sources consulted but also to multimedia contents such as images or videos. For example, looking for a recipethe chatbot could respond by providing us with a detail of the various preparation steps by attaching images depicting the various steps.
Finally it would seem that OpenAI's new product could exploit the search engine Bing Of Microsoft. A choice probably dictated by the fact that there is one between the two companies strong partnership which has led the Redmond company to invest large amounts of funds in OpenAI in the last period.
What are the benefits of an AI-powered search engine
Among the main criticisms leveled at AI-based chatbots is the impossibility of verifying sources on which the latter based their answers. L'evolution of the chatbots towards an approach similar to that of a search engine could therefore alleviate this problem, since searching, linking and citing articles and documents online is what is currently missing in the panorama of the most widespread chatbots.
It could therefore open up a new chapter for the online search sectorno longer based on manual keyword searches within a web browser but on complex queries fed to an artificial intelligence algorithm.
