OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced last night what was an open secret. The company run by Sam Altman, backed by Microsoft since 2019 with an investment of 13 billion dollars, has finally launched its own search engine, SearchGPT. The move is seen as a challenge to Google, the great dominator to date in the search engine segment, which also competes with OpenAI with its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool, the Gemini model.
Altman wants to bring the success of ChatGPT, which many consider the best large language model on the market, to a sector that it had not yet entered, despite the fact that analysts considered it its logical area of growth. The great advances of generative AI, which is capable of creating content from a series of instructions, have dug the grave of two segments that are beginning to unify: voice assistants (such as Alexa or Siri) and conventional search engines. We are moving towards a single platform capable of dialoging like a human, analyzing documents (texts, audio, images or videos) in different domains and presenting all this information in an orderly manner.
SearchGPT is the bet in this race of OpenAI, a company with which Prisa Media, publisher of EL PAÍS, signed a collaboration agreement last March. The new OpenAI tool is, for the moment, being tested by 10,000 users in the US to “gather opinions”, although there is a waiting list which only Americans can sign up for.
SearchGPT searches the Internet for information in real time and presents it to the user in an organized manner. Instead of offering a list of links, it presents it in text form, with images. The sources, which are linked, can be clicked on, but it is not necessary to do so.
A new way to search
Unlike ChatGPT, the new search engine does not rely on the data it has been trained on to provide answers, but instead searches the internet for information. “SearchGPT is a prototype of new search capabilities designed to combine the power of our AI models with information from the web to provide you with fast, timely answers from clear, relevant sources,” OpenAI says on its website.
“Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort and often multiple attempts to get relevant results. We believe that by improving the conversational capabilities of our models with real-time information from the web, finding what you are looking for can be faster and easier,” the company says.
Another of the peculiarities of this search engine is that, once a query has been made, follow-up questions can be asked, “just as you would do in a conversation with a person.”
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